


Reunited Falls

by Steerpike13713



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Reunion Falls, Drabble Collection, F/F, Family, Fluff and Angst, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-23
Updated: 2017-03-23
Packaged: 2018-10-09 12:12:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 29,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10411881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Steerpike13713/pseuds/Steerpike13713
Summary: Almost thirteen years ago, a set of twins were born unexpectedly to the Pines family of Piedmont, California. In one world, their parents made things stretch to cover two children. In another, they didn't, and so Mabel Pines grew up with her Grunkle Stan in Gravity Falls and Dipper Pines grew up in California with their parents, and neither of them ever knew they had a twin.Well.That was the plan, anyway.





	1. In Which There Are Gnomes

My name is Dipper. The girl currently breaking every speed restriction known to man in a golf cart is my sister Mabel. We’ve just met. You may be wondering what I’m doing in the middle of a dark and incredibly creepy forest, fleeing from a creature of unimaginable horror in the company of my long-lost twin sister, who doesn’t actually know that she is long-lost or my sister. Rest assured there is a perfectly logical explanation.

Let’s rewind. This whole thing started a couple weeks before the end of term, when the whole middle-school graduating class had to do a project on our lives so far to fill in time before the end of term. It was meant to be a sort of ‘looking back on the past to prepare for the future’ type gig, but in practice it usually ended up more like ‘let’s look at and humiliate everyone for embarrassing incidents we’d all blissfully forgotten about before now’. Not quite sure why anyone bothered, really, but I was getting a hard enough time without offering up more reasons to pick on me than they already had, so I figured just going along with it wasn’t going to do me any harm. Getting a copy of my birth certificate out of the local hospital was a necessary step for the project, so there I was, trawling through hospital records with the rest of the class, when I stumbled on her. Mabel Pines, born 31st August 1999, just five minutes before me. It wasn’t all that difficult, from there, to reach the obvious conclusion.

Asking Mom and Dad wasn’t likely to end well, and not just because they might not even notice I’d asked for a week. So, I went for the next best thing – I called up Nana Pines and asked her about it. The answers I got weren’t exactly reassuring, but they gave me something to go off – Mabel had been given up when she was three months old, shipped off to our Great-Uncle Stan’s place in some sleepy little town in Oregon called Gravity Falls. Given I didn’t even know we _had_ a Great-Uncle Stan this came as a bit of a surprise. On the bright side, I had a town and a full name rather than worrying about whether whoever she ended up with might have changed it. A few minutes and a google search later and I had an address. Mom and Dad were easy enough to get off my back with a story about some summer camp for kids with an interest in the paranormal that I’d heard about through an online – though that might have been just them being that glad to hear I had an actual _friend_ , what with the way things had been going at school since…pretty much forever, really. So, about a week after the end of the school year, there I was, on the bus to Gravity Falls, Oregon, to go and stay with an uncle and a sister I had never even met. On balance, probably not the best plan I’ve ever come up with, but that could just be because of what happened next.

Well, all my worst suspicions were confirmed by the bus stop, out in the middle of a dark and incredibly creepy forest, and things only went downhill from there. The fact that the bus turned around to go back the way it had come gave me a pretty good idea of which way the town was, at least until I found myself deep in said dark and incredibly creepy forest with no sign of the way back to the road. That was when I started to panic. The panicking wasn’t helped by my literally tripping over an abandoned golf-cart in the middle of the woods, or being bowled over by a girl in a cape printed with stars, who shoved me into the cart with a screech of-

“DRIVE FUCKING DRIVE!”

“- _what?_ ” “They’re catching up – move!” she shoved me again, harder, and slid into the driver’s seat, floored the accelerator and took off like the end of the world was behind her, which it wasn’t. Not quite. What _was_ after us was…I had absolutely no idea what that thing was. It was shaped a bit like a giant garden gnome, if a garden gnome were about a hundred feet tall and lurid pink. Quite why some random girl was being chased through the woods by a rampaging lawn ornament I didn’t know and honestly didn’t much want to find out.

She swerved to avoid a tree, just as a wave of what looked like smaller flying lawn ornaments landed on the golf-cart and started eating bits of it. Ok, no idea what that was all about. The girl didn’t seem all that fazed, and I was hardly about to question it when our lives might depend on defending ourselves quickly, so throwing the little suckers out of the cart as fast as possible seemed to be the name of the game, right until one of them latched onto my face with its teeth and seemed unwilling to be shaken off by anything right up until the girl took another too-fast swerve through a clearing, slamming my head off the dashboard and apparently stunning the gnomes. Well, on the plus side, I no longer had a garden gnome on my face. On the other hand, I was pretty sure a concussion was the only sensible explanation for this mess, so repeated head trauma probably wasn’t going to do me that many favours.

“What are those things?” I demanded, rubbing at my bruised and probably-not-actually-broken nose.

“Gnomes,” the girl said breathlessly, grinning over from the driver’s seat. “Hey, I haven’t seen you in town before, have I? You look really familiar for some reason…”

I shrugged, “Uh, no, don’t think you have. I just got here today.”

“Cool. Name’s Mabel, by the way. And you are?”

“What-? Oh, uh, Dipper. That is, my name’s Dipper. Wait- Mabel? Mabel _Pines_?”

“Yeah – hang on, were you on this morning’s tour at the Mystery Shack? ‘Cos I don’t care if we’re escaping the gnomes together, the ‘no refunds’ policy still holds…”

“What- No! No! I literally just got off the bus half an hour ago!”

Another wave of thrown gnomes landed then – just as well Mabel had a bat in the golf-cart, really, as well as a shovel in the back, and just how much time did- did _my sister_ spend fighting off monsters if she needed two weapons for one afternoon in the woods?

“So…where are we headed, exactly?”

Mabel grinned, “Back to the Shack! I’ve got _just_ the thing for gnome attacks…”

Well, that answered that question, if she’d had time to work out an actual solution for this sort of situation she spent way too much time getting chased by gnomes. Why was she getting chased by gnomes?

“Uh, why are you getting chased by gnomes?” I asked, trying to sound casual. I think it worked all right, too. I mean, my voice might’ve cracked a bit in the middle there, but I’d like to see you try better when there are gnomes chasing after you and _your_ long-lost twin sister.

“Oh- Uh, funny story, actually. Would you believe the little jerks wanted me to marry them?”

“-what?”

“I know, right! And there are like a thousand of them! The wedding alone could last for days!” she grinned, “So I cut my way out of the ropes and ran.”

“Right…makes perfect sense. So, uh, is this something that happens a lot around here?”

Mabel took another tight turn, but didn’t stop grinning. Yep, definitely a few frogs short of a bucket. “Well, they got Pacifica first. Then they went for Grenda.” Her grin widened. “Hey! Do you think they only went for me to stop me rescuing their other gnome-queen options? Because if so – should I be insulted? I mean, not that I wanted to get kidnapped by gnomes or anything, but being their last choice has got to be worse, right?”

“Uh…not sure, really,” I grabbed the edge of the golf cart for purchase as Mabel sent it into another dizzying spin to avoid – was that an actual _tree_ the gnomes had just thrown at us? – going so fast we actually left the ground for a few moments before landing with an ear-splitting screech of rubber on wood.

“Shit, they’re catching up!” Mabel looked over her shoulder, barely paying attention to the trees ahead even as I grabbed for the wheel to stop us from crashing into a redwood that was smack-dab in front of us, but Mabel was too busy worrying about the gnomes to notice. It wasn’t the best bit of steering the world’s ever seen, but it didn’t leave us as a pair of twin greasy smears on the bark, so there was that.

Then, of course, we broke through the treeline and the golf-cart overturned, sending us both flying into the side of what I was going to say was probably the Mystery Shack. Yeah. Not the best first impression I could’ve got of the place, but it was difficult to see how anyone could get a more accurate idea about what life around here was going to be like.

“It’s the end of the line, honey!” called the gnome at the very top of the giant fusion-gnome’s hat…how did they even do that, anyway? And why was the result that shade of pink? “Marry us before we do something crazy!”

“You mean crazier than forcing some random twelve-year-old to marry you?” I demanded, even as Mabel and I backed away as best we could, plastering ourselves against the wall of the shack.  “Why are you even doing this?”

“What- Oh, hey, random kid! Uh, listen, this is sort of a private matter, so if you could just back off while us and our fiancée have a little _conversation_ …”

“I’m _not_ your fiancée, you little jerks!”

“…wait…you’re not her _boyfriend_ , are you? Because if you are, we’re going to have a little _problem_ here…” Something in his tone suggested that this was not the sort of problem Dipper would get out without at least two broken limbs if he was lucky.

“What? No!”

“-I only met him an hour ago!”

“-I’m her _brother!_ ”

“Okaaay…not the boyfriend,” the gnome said, and his voice was really starting to grate now, even putting aside the ‘trying to force my sister to marry him’ thing. “ _Yes._ And you can’t set one of your uncle’s crazy inventions on us this time!”

Mabel’s eyes flicked sideways, but I couldn’t tell what it was she was looking at until she sighed. “Uh…I guess I don’t have a choice, do I?”

“What- Mabel-!”

She glared at me. “ _Trust_ me,” she hissed, before looking back up at the gnomes. “All right, Jeff. I’ll marry you.”

“ _What!_ Don’t do this, are you crazy?”

“What did I say about trusting me?” she whispered, over the sounds of the gnomes celebrating and scuffling as the topmost gnome climbed down over the bodies of his…I had absolutely no idea what they were to him. Probably siblings, if gnomes worked like a lot of other species that had one queen, which made the whole ‘we want to marry a twelve-year-old’ thing even creepier than it already was. And _that_ would’ve been creepy even if it _wasn’t_ my sister they wanted. I was still trying to come up with some way of calling this whole thing off when the gnome leader – Jeff, I guess – reached us, a little velvet box in his hand and an insufferably smug impression on his face which made me wonder just how far you could kick a gnome in one go and whether or not I should try and find out. I’d like to say I restrained myself long enough to let Mabel’s plan play out, but I didn’t. The answer to ‘how far can you kick a gnome’ is, it turns out ‘not very far, because they’ll bite and cling onto your foot if you try it’.  I would also like to say I didn’t hop about screaming like a little girl while this happened, but that wouldn’t be true either. I was about mid-hop when the leaf-blower came out, and Jeff was sucked straight off my foot and into the leaf-blower feet first, wedging him tight in the tube.

“That was for Grenda!” Mabel shouted, “This is for Pacifica!” she pulled back the handle as far towards ‘reverse’ as it would go. “And _this_ \- This is for me!”

She aimed the leaf-blower at the tower of gnomes, and shoved the handle forwards. End result: one collapsed kaiju-gnome and an awful lot of confused little bearded men wondering where the orders were coming from now Jeff had gone flying off into the forest, and Mabel glaring at me with the leaf-blower still in her hands.

“I thought I told you to trust me!” she said, poking me in the chest. “Who are you, anyway, and what was all that bullshit you were spouting back there about being my brother.”

“Uh…funny story…” I said weakly, but then gave up and fished the birth certificates out of my backpack. “Guess I can’t hide it much longer…my name’s Dipper Pines. I’m your twin.”


	2. In Which There Is A Room, And An Elephant

The place had changed a lot since he had lived there. Part of it was Stanley – his brother’s personality was written all over this place, and it made Ford uneasy. He’d never really thought of Stanley as someone with an overwhelming personality before. He was always just…there. When they were kids, he was the constant presence at Ford’s back, as they grew older he became the millstone around his neck, and then, after the science fair and the fight that had followed, he had been the shadow that had haunted every visit home until Ford finally fell out of touch. Always there, but never in the foreground, never the centre of attention. Now, though, Stan’s flair for the dramatic, his love of tall stories, his untidiness, the disorder that seemed to follow him wherever he went was everywhere Ford looked, and it felt _wrong_. This whole dimension felt wrong now, but the house most of all.

“Look at us,” Stanley said from beside him, “When did we become old men?”

“You look like Dad,” Ford said, and that was wrong, too. It shouldn’t be this easy to fall into old patterns after…how long? It was forty years, not thirty, whatever Stan might claim. They’d not spoken like this since…since Stan lost him West Coast Tech, and disappeared out of Ford’s life so thoroughly that within a few years he was almost used to no-one remembering he had had a twin at all.

“Ugh, don’t say that,” Stan said, screwing up his face, but there was laughter in his voice. It was easy to laugh with him, for a moment. Stan had always had the knack of getting people to laugh when he wanted. Maybe that was why he had never taken anything seriously, with the possible exception of boxing.

Ford sighed. “Ok, Stanley, here’s the deal. You can stay here for the summer to watch the kids, I’ll stay down in the basement and try to contain any remaining damage.” A touch of steel crept into his voice now. “But when the summer’s over, you give me my house back, you give me my _name_ back, and this Mystery Shack junk is over forever! You got it?”

Stan looked over at him, and Ford tried to tell himself that it was anger and not hurt that he saw in his brother’s eyes. “You’re really not going to thank me, are you?” he said. Ford glared at him, but rather than crumpling, as he always had before that last, awful fight by the portal, Stan’s chin went up, his shoulders went back and he seemed to be attempting the world’s best impression of a brick wall. “No.”

“What-? Stan-!” Ford started, but Stan didn’t seem to be in any mood to be interrupted as he drew himself up so that he seemed to fill the whole room.

“Look,” he said, in a low, fierce voice, that was for once entirely devoid of humour. “I get it, all right. I screwed up. Fine. And if it were just me, that’d be the end of it, and I’d be out of your hair as soon as summer was over. But if you think I’m going to let you throw Mabel out on the streets for my mistakes-”

“Mabel?” Ford  stared at his brother, “Mabel will go back with her brother at the end of the summer, just like she was always  going to – what does that have to do with-”

“No,” Stan said flatly, “She won’t.”

“Stanley-”

Stan glared at him. “Mabel’s been living here since she was three months old,” he said flatly, folding his arms. “The parents…well, you know the drill. Didn’t plan for twins, found out early on they couldn’t handle two babies – hell, the way Dipper talks about it it sounds as though they could hardly handle _him_.” He shrugged. “I wasn’t going to let her go into the foster system, and…well, it’s hardly as though there wasn’t the space. Dipper only found out she _existed_ a few weeks ago.” Ford almost wanted to look away, but couldn’t as his brother took a sharp step forward. “She’s already been threatened with losing her home once this summer,” Stan growled, “And even if I could do that to her again – do you know what _happens_ to kids like that on the street, Ford? Because that’s what we’d be going back to. Everything I had went into that portal, and there’s only one way of life I know. If you want your name back you’re welcome to it, but if you want to turn _my niece_ into one of those statistics – fuck, I can’t count how many like that I’ve known who ended up dying of the cold, or hunger, or just because a kid sleeping by the side of the road made for an easy target. And considering some of the things I’ve seen, I’d say they might even be the lucky ones!”

“Stanley-”

“Don’t. Don’t you even start. Because if you think Mabel deserves any part of that nightmare, I won’t be held accountable for what I do then.” Stan brushed past him, but turned at the door to look at Ford. “Stay away from those kids, Ford. I don’t want to put them in any more danger.”

“And at the end of the summer?” Ford demanded. “You’re not expecting me to leave my own home, are you?”

“This place hasn’t been your home in thirty years, Ford,” Stan said, and for once his voice was cold. “I don’t care what you do anymore. Stay or go, it’s your choice, but I’m not the one kicking you out. Just, whatever it is you’re doing, leave the kids out of it.”

The door closed behind him and Ford was left alone, in a room, with an elephant.


	3. In Which There Is A Family

That little girl – not so little, he thought ruefully, she had to be at least eleven, more probably twelve or thirteen by the look of her – hadn’t let go of his hand since they’d left the clearing, her vice-like grip at once painful and oddly comforting. It all was, really. The boy in the blue baseball cap trotting ahead, glancing back every now and again with an odd look in his eyes, and the two men bringing up the rear who were arguing in low, concerned voices, just far enough away that he couldn’t make out the words. They had told him that his name was Stan, that the coat and sweater he had been wearing before belonged to the taller of the two men, whose name was also Stan, though he preferred to be called Ford, and who was apparently his twin brother. Man, their parents must have hated them to give them both the same name, he’d said when that came out, which made Ford’s face go pale and drawn as he admitted that, yeah, they probably must’ve. The other man he didn’t know and no-one had told him what he was doing there. Another relative, maybe, though it was difficult to picture how Ford, and by extension Stan himself, could be related to that guy, considering just how _un_ -alike they looked, what with the _nose_ , and the beard, and the eyes and all. He tried to cudgel his brains into providing some hint, some scrap of information about any of these people who kept looking at him as if…as if he was somehow the bedrock of their world, that had suddenly crumbled…but it was no use. His mind simply wouldn’t cough up so much as a detail about any of them, not what Ford liked to eat for breakfast or why the girl tugging at his hand was wearing a cape printed with yellow stars over her pink skirt and waistcoat, or why she of all of them seemed the most upset by whatever it was that had left him like this. He wasn’t fool enough to think she was his, not at his age, whatever the exact figure was, but maybe a granddaughter or something? Yeah, that fit with how old he felt and the way she was clinging onto his hand like a lifeline. He supposed that meant he might’ve been married at some point, but when he tried to imagine himself with a wife he came up blanker even than usual.

“Hey, dudes! I saw the town wasn’t all freaky anymore! Did you do it or, uh, was it all some big weird coincidence, like Bill deciding to just go home and sulk because things weren’t going the way he wanted?” Stan looked up, to see what looked like a cross between a man and a gopher in a question-mark t-shirt loping towards them, waving. As he did, a wide, beaming grin spread across the gopher-man’s face. “Mr Pines! You’re alive!”

“Uh…shouldn’t I be?” Stan asked, frowning. Ok, waking up with no memories wasn’t something that generally happened without something pretty big and nasty causing it, but he didn’t _feel_ like he ought to have been in any real danger of dying over it. “Hey, who is this guy, anyway?”

The man stopped dead, his eyes going huge and tearful. “M-Mr Pines?”

“Aw, hell,” said the man with the long beard, looking from Stan to the new guy, “I suppose I’d better be the one to tell him ‘bout…well, you know.” He sounded guilty and miserable and Stan couldn’t help but feel sorry for him as he broke away to take the younger man’s arm.

“Hey,” the girl said, as beard-guy led the other man away and Stan looked after them, wishing he knew what it was that made them both look so miserable. “It’s ok. It’ll come back to you.”

Ford made a doubtful sort of noise, but didn’t say anything, and Stan’s heart sank. It’ll come back to you. But what if it didn’t? What if he was stuck like this, never knowing what he’d done to make these people care about him so damn much? He didn’t even realise how badly he was shaking until Ford put the suit jacket they all said was Stan’s around his shoulders as gopher-man and the other guy whose name Stan still hadn’t heard caught up to them.

As he looked up, he saw they’d come to a…well, shack was the right word for it. Place looked like it’d just been hit by two hurricanes and a baby-sized earthquake. It was the boy who got the door open, and why hadn’t anyone told Stan his or the girl’s name yet? It wasn’t as if it was much to ask. Inside, the place looked…well, about as bad as the outside, really, but it didn’t really seem fair to say so.

“Hey, this is a real nice place you got here,” he tried instead, and…yeah, ok, he could see how it could be. If it weren’t sort of smashed, and if a load of plaster hadn’t fallen down from the roof, it might’ve been a decent enough place to live, the sort he might manage to swing for himself one day, if he was lucky.

“It's your place, Grunkle Stan,” the boy said with a catch in his voice, and something in Stan’s chest ached. No kid that age should sound that wrecked. No kid that age should have to.

 “Don’t you remember? Even a little?” the girl – her name, what was her _name_? – asked, looking tearful.

Stan sat down, and felt better almost at once. “Nope. But this chair hugs my butt like it remembers.” He gave a happy little sigh as the aches and pains he’d hardly even noticed before eased, then opened his eyes to see the five of them, all looking at him as if he’d just kicked all their puppies and announced that he was gearing up for another round. “Hey, why the long faces? You guys look like it's someone's funeral.” His eyes went to the younger man, who was sobbing openly now, tears coursing down his still fairly gopher-like face. It didn’t look right, somehow. “Who's that big guy crying in the corner?”

That, of course, only made the guy cry harder, and the girl caught her hair in her hands, looking absolutely stricken.

“Hey.” It was beard-man. Probably ought to find his name out, too. He perched on the arm of the chair and it felt…nice. Sort of familiar. “I suppose I didn’t get the chance to say out there – my name’s Fiddleford. Fiddleford Hadron McGucket. Fidds, if you like.”

“Uh…nice to meet you, Fidds,” Stan said, “Wait, _Fiddleford_? Seems mine weren’t the only set of parents who hated my guts ‘round here!”

Fidds huffed out a laugh. He had a nice laugh, a high, wheezing cackle that sounded a bit mad but also…kinda cute, if you liked that sort of thing. Which Stan just might, or so it was starting to sound like. “Yeah, I, uh, got a real hard time for that in the schoolyard, you can imagine. I guess this all seems…well, a bit overwhelming.”

“Yeah,” Stan agreed, the smile slipping off his face, “You can say that again.”

Fidds grinned, “I know I was a right wreck after…well, let’s just say you’re not the only one ’round here who’s had memory problems.”

“Really? That sucks. So…did you get them back? Your memories, I mean.” Stan hated how pathetic he sounded on that last bit, but he had to know.

Fiddleford grinned at him, “In the end – took me a while, though, and I’m still not rightly sure about some of it, but…” he made a so-so gesture with one hand, “It’s getting better by the day – you just need to give it time, and remember, it’s all right if you don’t remember everything. If half of what you’ve said over the years is true, there’s stuff you’ve done you might not even want to remember.”

“You’re not pushing ‘ignorance is bliss’ again, Fiddleford?” Ford demanded, “Wasn’t that wretched mind-erasing cult proof enough-”

Fidds’ head came up sharply, “ _Did I say that, I don’t think I said that_ – look, Ford, all I’m saying is that if Stan’s memory isn’t the same as it was by the end of this…it’s not going to change things for the rest of us. We’re all still here if you want us. _I’m_ still here.” That last spoken softer, just for Stan as Fidds looked down again to look him in the face, laden with meaning Stan didn’t know and didn’t fully understand.

“Uh…thanks, I guess.”

Fiddleford’s expression was for a moment open and heartbroken, but then he looked away, to the girl in the corner. “Mabel, sugar, what’s that you got there?”

“Just a second…” the girl – Mabel, her name was Mabel – kept on rummaging through the wreckage until she produced, from somewhere amidst the beams, a purple-bound journal that looked to be thicker than _War and Peace_ with all the extra pages that had been glued into it, the binding extended clumsily with a wide strip of fabric at the spine. “My scrapbook!” she explained, when everyone but Fiddleford stared at her, dumbfounded. “Well, our scrapbook, really – we started putting it together after I wanted to know where all my baby photos were!”

She hurried over, bent almost double over the weight of the book, and scrambled up onto the arm of the chair to wedge herself between Stan and Fiddleford, half on the arm and half on Stan’s lap as she let the book fall open. Stan bent to get a look at the page, and the picture of…what was that, a mermaid? He felt more than saw the boy…no-one had mentioned his name yet, and he didn’t want to ask and worsen the awful hurt look on the kid’s face…hop up on the other arm of the chair, and Ford leaning against the side to look over Stan’s shoulder.

“That’s from when I first arrived here,” Mabel said, nudging Stan and pointing at another photograph, at the very top of the page, of a tiny baby with a tuft of brown hair, looking up at the camera with a slightly confused expression. “I was three months old, and _already_ the better-looking twin.”

“There is no way you can possibly know that!” the boy protested.

Mabel stuck her tongue out at him. “When you produce a cuter baby picture of yourself than that I’ll believe it, Dipper.”

“I can’t! All mine are at home with Mom and Dad, and…y’know. They’re not really the ‘scrapbooks and baby pictures’ type.”

“You just don’t want to admit that I was always the pretty one of the family,” Mabel sniffed.

Stan glanced between the two of them. “Uh…you want to explain all that?” he tried.

Mabel huffed, “Well,” she started, “Dipper and I are twins, but…”

“…but Mom and Dad couldn’t afford two kids,” Dipper finished for her, “So they chose which one of us they liked best and sent Mabel away to live with you.”

Stan stared at him, “You’re kidding, right, kid?”

“Nope,” Dipper said matter-of-factly, “That’s pretty much what happened. You’re our great-uncle on our dad’s side, and...well, apparently you were there when we were born. You’ve got this really lovely story about how I was nearly strangled by the umbilical cord on the way out.” Ford gave a shocked little intake of breath, and Stan couldn’t help but agree with him on that one – what sort of fucked-up weirdo _was_ he, that he went around telling the kid stories like that?

“It’s fine,” Dipper said quickly, “I mean, obviously it didn’t strangle me, but it kind of freaked Mom and Dad out, so they decided to keep me because I was going to need a bit more care, and, well…you had the Mystery Shack to run.”

Mabel bit her lip, but forced a grin when Stan looked at her. “What? Aw, c’mon, like I minded! I had you, and Soos, and Wendy and Grunkle Fidds looking out for me! It was great!” Stan might not remember anything, but he knew enough about that tone of voice to put his arm round the kid and pretend to ignore the bright, forced note to her voice.

“Why me, though?” Stan asked, “I mean…why not Ford or someone? If we’re brothers, that means your mom or dad must be related to him too.” He didn’t feel like the sort of person who’d be considered responsible enough for two people to just _give away their child_ to. Maybe he wasn’t, maybe he’d just been the only option they had, or maybe that was one more thing his amnesia had stolen from him. Ford and Fidds exchanged an odd sort of look over Stan’s head, he didn’t think they knew he’d noticed, and he bit down on the little flare-up of temper that triggered. Ok, whatever it was, it was big. They wouldn’t be looking this nervous about it if it wasn’t.

“I…wasn’t really available when it happened,” Ford admitted, and Stan wasn’t sure he wanted to know what the hell _that_ meant, but, what the hell.

“What the hell does that mean?”

Ford shifted and coughed nervously, “I was…away from Gravity Falls for a long time, and I was out of touch with the family for a long time before that. You were always much better about that sort of thing. Besides,” Ford added, with a tight, not-especially-happy sort of smile, “Mabel doesn’t seem to have suffered from it.”

“What? Why would I?” Mabel protested, “Grunkle Stan was the best – no-one would’ve taught me to box, or made sure I always had a bat before going into the woods!”

“Oh.” Well, not sure where to go with that one. “Uh, is it that dangerous out in those woods?”

Mabel and Dipper shared a look, then nodded, in unison.

“First day in town I nearly got killed by a bunch of gnomes,” Dipper said, screwing up his face in disgust. “And that’s not even getting into all the weirdness we’ve been having lately.”

Stan was just about to ask about that, before-

_“who the hell is this kid?”_

_mabel’s face is scratched, and she’s got bruises on her legs that look like gnome bites, which means that he’s probably going to have to talk fidds out of building another giant robot to go and deal with the gnomes. still, at least today’s batch of tourists have moved on, and that frees up the rest of stan’s afternoon. the other kid, the one in the hat with the star on it, is the issue, and he’s glancing between stan and mabel as if he’s not sure who to explain himself to._

_“grunkle stan,” mabel says accusingly, “you would’ve told me, if i had a twin, wouldn’t you?”_

_she looks back at the other kid with that expression she always wears when she’s trying to prove someone wrong, and it would be so, so easy to say ‘yeah, of course i would, sweetie’, and let this kid – what did they call him in the end? – go back to his parents so that mabel never has to worry about having someone she depends on that much, because stan’s been that person before, and it only ever ends in tears._

_“why’d you want to know, pumpkin?” he says instead, because, hey, running away from his problems has always worked for him before._

_“well, this guy says he’s my brother,” mabel says, jerking her chin at the kid, and the moment stan gets a good look at the boy, he knows that this is him. he looks so much like stan did at that age it positively aches, and so much like mabel, too, and wasn’t that supposed to be different with boy-girl pairs of twins?_

_“he’s right,” stan admits, “what’s your name, kid?”_

_“what- uh, dipper. dipper pines.”_

_“right, dipper. dipper’s telling the truth, mabel. you’re twins.”_

Stan jerked back in his seat.

“Grunkle Stan?” Mabel said nervously, “Wait – are you remembering?” her eyes are huge, bright and brown, and he can’t say no to them.

“I, uh, I think so,” he admitted, “So, why’d I never tell you you had a twin?”

Mabel and Dipper looked at each other again, and if Stan didn’t know now they hadn’t grown up together he wouldn’t have been able to tell.

“You said you wanted to protect her,” Dipper said, sounding dubious.

Mabel nodded, “Yeah! I mean…I was angry at first, but…who wants to grow up knowing their parents didn’t want them?”

“Right,” Stan said. “And, uh, what is ‘all this weirdness we’ve been having lately’?”

Dipper gave a nervous sort of laugh. “Oh! Uh, that. Well…things have been kind of hectic lately – I mean, this town was always weird, but the last couple of weeks have been strange even by Gravity Falls standards…”

“Yes, well, that’s over now,” Ford said decidedly, “The worst of it, anyway. Go on, Mabel.” Mabel nodded, and guided Stan’s fingers down to the mermaid picture. It was a pretty cute image, all things considered, a chubby toddler with a tail that was pretty obviously knitted out of some sort of glittery wool, with a broad band of pink fabric tied around her upper body and safety-pinned in place, waving her arms excitedly at a crowd of cooing tourists from inside a glass tank.

“My first big role!” Mabel said proudly, “Lorina the Littlest Mermaid. You always said tourists would go nuts over a cute baby, and a cute _mermaid_ baby…” she whistled, and Stan couldn’t help the grin that crossed his face then. The next few pages were similar – a range of costumes and tourist attractions starting from Mabel in a cage about as big as your average playpen as ‘Chabo the Wolf-Baby’, which provoked a snort from Dipper and an anecdote about being dressed as a wolf-boy himself and made to dance for tourists over the summer, which was…huh, actually a pretty neat idea, now Stan came to think about it. If people were gullible enough to buy that the toddler bundled up in a furry onesie in the photo was a werewolf, they’d buy it just as easily in a preteen.

“Uh…noticing a common theme, here,” he said, after the third picture of a toddler-aged Mabel bound up in a sort of cocoon as the Butterfly Child of Gravity Falls, “How come you’re always shut up in some sort of cage for these pictures?”

Mabel beamed, “I was getting too big for you to carry around while you did the tours,” she repeated brightly, “And the Corduroys couldn’t take me all the time, what with the logging camp and everything, so…all this just stopped me getting into trouble while you were running the shack. It was sort of fun, too, like playing pretend. Then Soos got hired and you started getting him to watch me instead of Mrs Corduroy.”

That, Stan supposed, made sense. And Mabel _did_ seem to be having the time of her life in most of the pictures, beaming wide enough to almost crack her face in two or snarling so ferociously that one middle-aged woman in a flower-printed shirt was almost cowering back against her much more sceptical-looking companion. Stan squinted down at it, willing some sort of mental image, but there was nothing, nothing but-

_the kid’s adorable, really, but there’s only so much stan’s back can take, and however much the punters fall over themselves to throw money at them whenever mabel babbles out the name of one of the exhibits from the sling stan usually carries her in, that’s not going to be worth jack if he can’t walk anymore because he’s put his back out carting the kid around all the time. it’s times like these which make stan wonder what he was thinking offering to take mabel on in the first place. there must’ve been hundreds of families out there who’d have killed to have her, and who’d have known far more about parenting than him, stanley-posing-as-stanford-pines who’d never so much as picked up a book on childcare in his life. it’s mabel’s thing for dressing up that gives him the idea, and even if stan can’t sew worth shit, he knows how to make a fake attraction look real, and it’s got precious little to do with what said attraction actually looks like. mabel wriggles no end when he’s trying to make the costume, and stan stabs his hand with the pins far more often than he gets her._

_“ow! fuck, kid, could you hold still a second?”_

_mabel giggles. “fug!” she says happily, “fug, fug, fug!”_

_“oh, shi- sugar. sugar. definitely meant to say sugar.” he might not be an expert, but swearing in front of kids is generally considered to be a pretty bad idea. “you, uh, wouldn’t take a doll or something in exchange for not doing that again, would you?” “fug!” mabel says happily._

_stan sighs. “thought not.”_

_‘fug’ is mabel’s new favourite word, which earns stan any number of dirty looks at greasy’s diner, and causes a few awkward moments on the tour. he covers it up pretty well, though, he thinks._

_“yeah, sorry about the language, folks. got her off a couple of sailors who caught her in a tuna net, and they didn’t want to watch their language ‘round this little mermaid. so, uh, who wants to take a picture with her?”_

“Grunkle Stan? Grunkle Stan?”

Stan shook himself, and glanced up at Mabel. “Huh. Guess all the swearing really was my fault.”

“I knew it!” Ford declared, and then looked guilty, even as Fidds snickered into his long beard.

Dipper, though, seemed absolutely elated as he glanced over at his sister. “It’s happening! Keep going!”

Nothing major happened for the next few pages, though it was kind of cute as the costumes got more and more elaborate from the time that Mabel explained she’d started to learn to sew. She’d started pretty young, all things considered, but she didn’t seem to be any the worse for it, and some of those exhibits really were pretty neat, even if the ‘Centicorn – Half Centaur, Half Unicorn!’ made Mabel scowl and turn the page faster than usual, and that one looked pretty damn impressive even if she hadn’t wanted to admit she was the one who put it together for some reason.

“Uh, Mabel?” that was Dipper, looking over Stan’s shoulder, “Is this whole book just things that were at the Mystery Shack when you were growing up?”

Mabel pouted, “Well, that’s what I got this scrapbook for – besides, all the best memories were in those exhibits – like, Grunkle Stan, look, this is what you had up when I started school, see?”

The Sascrotch had apparently been new that year, and the joke had gone entirely over Mabel’s head. She’d started doing tours a couple of years later, with a pre-written script and jokes that she’d spent weeks rehearsing so that she could still recite half of it now, which she did complete with jazz hands and wide, flourishing gestures that almost took the guy Stan assumed was Soos’s head off when she swept her arm a bit too enthusiastically, and yeah, that wasn’t something he remembered, but there was something familiar about the slight flare of warmth in his chest, and the grin he felt spreading out all across his face at the enthusiasm with which she delivered every corny, overblown line of it.

“Not bad, kid,” he said, throwing an arm around her, “So, that was your first tour?”

Mabel grinned, “I got two tours a week after that,” she said proudly, “As well as presenting sometimes after school. I only got off scripts when I was seven, though.”

“Seven, huh?” Stan snorted, “I’d like to be able to remember that.” It was the wrong thing to say, and only had to look at the expressions on everyone’s faces to know it, but what else was he supposed to say?

Mabel swallowed, and flipped ahead a few pages, “This is everyone as they were at the start of the summer,” she said and, Stan leaned over to look more to humour her than anything.

Well, there was Mabel, in the same get-up she was wearing now, white shirt and bow-tie – unless that was the ties for the cape – and pink waistcoat with a little shooting star embroidered on the pocket. And there was Dipper, for once not joined at the hip with his sister wearing the same blue sweater with ‘No. 1 Twin’ and the Little Dipper on the front. Soos looked much the same as ever, and that was probably himself in the middle, because the glasses were wrong for Ford, and he could tell already that that wide grin in the photograph wasn’t an expression he was ever likely to see on Ford’s face. And there, just in the corner, his head ducked and looking shyly out from behind his glasses, was Fidds, wearing a sweater which read, beneath a much shorter beard, ‘If Found, Please Return To The Mystery Shack’ in bright neon letters that – were they actually _glowing_?

Ford, looking at it, frowned. “…It’s very…bright,” he said cautiously.

“Yeah, well…” Fiddleford took off his glasses and started polishing them on his sleeve, but it didn’t fool anyone – it didn’t even fool Stan, and he didn’t even remember what the guy’s tells were. “I was in a…uh…a pretty bad state when I first came here.” He gave a weak chuckle, and Stan swallowed as another flash of memory came in.

 _mcgucket’s wandered off again, and for the umpteenth time stan has to wonder whether it wouldn’t just be simpler to let him go, but mabel’s taken a shine to the old kook, and well…stan’s seen the guy ‘round his son often enough to know the guy doesn’t want anything to do with his old man. call stan a sucker, but that’s never sat right with him, even if mcgucket_ is _a complete nut. which is why he’s here, at the dump, trying to talk one very stubborn hillbilly into coming home. it’d be easier to see him if he’d wear an actual goddamn colour for a change, but mcgucket has steadfastly refused to let stan buy (well, steal) anything for him, and none of stan’s things’ll fit. it takes two and a half hours to coax mcgucket back to the mystery shack, and he only really relents when mabel turns up with soos to give him the puppy-dog eyes until the old coot agrees to just get in the damn car and come home, and it’s getting dark by the time that happens, so that except for the beard the old guy is practically impossible to spot in the gloom._

“Sheesh, I’ll say you were,” Stan said before he could quite stop himself, “The lights got added after the third time you ran off and sent Mabel into a panic in case you’d got on the wrong side of those creeps in the red robes!” he coughed. “Not that I minded. Free publicity and all that.”

“You remember?” Ford asked, sounding…well, about as astonished as you’d expect of a guy whose brother just remembered some random loon before him. And Stan still wasn’t quite sure what happened in the intervening…it had to be four or five years if he was going by Mabel’s height now next to what he remembered…but McGucket – Fiddleford – certainly looked a lot better now than he had in that little trip down memory lane. Well, except for the beard, but at least the guy isn’t wearing a goddamn plaster on his beard now – why the hell hadn’t anybody told him about that?

“Uh…I remember something.”  Stan admitted.

Fiddleford raised his hands again to placate him. “If it’s the thing with the pterodactyl, I swear I did not know how dangerous that thing was going to be. I mean, it was just out of the egg, who’d have known it’d try and eat me right away?”

Ford started, and stared at Fiddleford open-mouthed, “A _pterodactyl_ -”

“Try and _eat_ you?” Stan demanded, horrified.

Dipper coughed. “We, uh, never got around to telling him that bit,” he admitted.

“Why the hell not?” Stan demanded. “You didn’t think I’d want to know this idiot nearly got himself killed by a huge prehistoric monster? Is that it?”

“It wasn’t like that, Mr Pines!” Soos said, “I mean…we got him out of there, didn’t we?”

Fidds nodded, giving a tired grin. “I’m not saying it was the best experience of my life, but it’s a long way from having been the worst.”

“And that’s supposed to be reassuring, is it?” Stan said nastily, which probably wasn’t helpful, but at least made him feel a bit better. “Look-” he said, and stopped when he realised he couldn’t think of anything else to say that really worked in this situation. Thankfully, Fidds seemed to know what he meant, and reached over to catch Stan’s hand in his. It was only then that Stan noticed it. “Hey! Why’re there threads tied ‘round both our fingers? What, was I forgetful or something even before all of this?”

“Not exactly,” Ford said, looking shifty, and of course, of fucking course that would be what triggered it.

_“marry me.”_

_“what?”_

_“if we live through this – if we win – marry me.”_

_is it too soon? fidds has been gone for two full weeks, the longest time stan has known without him since mabel brought him home, half-starved and looking more like a scarecrow than a human being, but still somehow cheerful and willing to help and so goddamn bright despite it all. stan’s not a man much given to sentimentality, but he knows a good thing when he’s got one going, and fidds and mabel and dipper might just be the best thing he’s ever had. fidds is being quiet now, and stan braces himself for the rejection, except:_

_“why wait?”_

“…Is that even legal?” Stan asked, staring down at the two loose threads from Mabel’s sweater that they’d used instead of rings. It’d been a bit of a rush job, vows shouted from opposite sides of the Shacktron while the battle with Bill was at its height without anyone else there to officiate – and anyway, he was pretty sure gay marriage still wasn’t legal in Oregon.

“When there are no cops around, anything’s legal!” Mabel chirped brightly, “Besides, Mayor Tyler said he’d be glad to sort out the paperwork so long as we got things back to normal.”

Dipper rolled his eyes, “This is a town that lets you marry _woodpeckers_ , Mabel. I don’t think it’s going to be that big an issue.”

“Besides,” Fidds put in helpfully, “I don’t think there’s anyone in town who’d refuse anything you asked for after all this – this is bigger even than proving the truth about Gideon.”

“Who’s Gideon?” Stan asked, staring at Fidds, who was positively beaming at him, looking prouder than Stan could quite believe anyone had ever been of him before, even when he still had his memories.

Dipper and Mabel exchanged a significant look.

“He…well, he said he was psychic. You never believed it, though, and that’s probably the one thing he wasn’t,” Dipper said, “He had this amulet that could cause telekinesis that he read about in Grunkle Ford’s second journal…”

“ _What_?” Ford barked, “How did he find-?”

“We don’t know!” Mabel said, “He…he tried to kill Dipper to get me to go out with him. We managed to stop him, and Grunkle Stan got him sent to prison, but then he got out…he’s trying to be better now, he says, but I don’t know…”

Fiddleford gave an irritated little huff, “I still say this would have been solved a whole lot easier if you’d just let me set a giant robot on him,” he said.

“Do you solve every problem with giant robots these days?” Ford asked, sounding bemused.

Fidds gave him a sidelong look, “Do you see me having a go at your coping mechanisms? No? Then leave mine out of this before I decide to remember whose fault they are.” It looked as if he was smiling under the beard, though, which was probably good, because Stan’s life would be so, so much easier if his brother and his husband got along. Huh, that was still a weird thought – his _husband_. He _had_ a husband. Because Stan was apparently a married man, married _to_ a man and living in a town where it was legal to marry woodpeckers. And, out of all of that, the strangest thing of all was that he’d been able to connive himself into a stable relationship and a family. Ok, said stable relationship was with a guy who used to live in the town dump and occasionally forgot who he was, but the Fidds who had looked at Stan and for whatever reason agreed to marry him right then and there was the same Fidds who was sitting next to him right now, the dorky professor-type in the sweater and tweed jacket whose expression was open and concerned and _lucid_ behind his green glasses, and Stan had no idea how it was he’d managed to pull that one off. He didn’t feel like the sort of guy who would’ve been able to get that lucky, even if he had had all his memories at the time. And even if Fidds knew full well he didn’t remember…he was still looking at Stan like he’d hung the moon, and that _hurt_ , because what had he done to earn that? Fuck all, that was what, and the sooner Fidds figured that out, the less it would hurt.

“So, uh, giant robots?” he asked, and saw Fidds blush and Dipper and Mabel’s faces brighten. The stories came thick and fast after that – childhood misdemeanours and Summerween pranks and road-trips and giant spider-women that made Fidds glare at him when that story came out, though even he hadn’t been able to contain his snickers at Mabel’s indignant protest that ‘you were on a break!’ for reasons Stan still hadn’t had properly explained to him. And, all right, maybe he didn’t remember all of it, but every now and again, someone would make an offhand comment, or some little detail of the story would spark something in Stan’s mind.

_he’s getting on for fifty now, and too old to be haring after some damn toddler all over the place, and if the ramirez kid is a bit overeager he’s also about as trustworthy as stan’s likely to find and the only person willing to work for what stan’s offering, and stan knows he’s made the right choice the moment he walks in on soos letting mabel cover him in stickers on his lunch break, sitting on the porch out back and throwing acorns at the gnomes digging through stan’s trash._

_mabel is two years old, and sick, and goddamn it what if he loses her too, what if he’s the reason she dies too, he can’t take another loss like this, and this is the one thing in his life he thought he’d been doing right so far._

_fidds’ wheezing cackle as he tries to explain for the thousandth time what the principles are behind the latest little gizmo he’s dreamed up, the plans spread out across the kitchen table more complicated than anything stan has ever seen, except-_

_mabel is eight, and coming home from school in tears because some other kid made fun of her in the schoolyard, so stan does what he always does, digs out the boxing gloves and teaches her a few basic blocks and punches, and he doesn’t even regret it when he’s called in a week later by the principal because mabel punched pacifica square in the nose._

_it’s plain unnatural, how well the twins get along, even if dipper isn’t quite used to the way things are out here and stan doesn’t want to encourage it because it’ll break mabel’s heart when dipper goes away at the end of the summer and stan doesn’t want to see that happen again._

_soos beams brighter than stan’s ever seen when the ‘employee of the month’ plaque goes up with soos’ face on it, and it’s such a little thing but it makes the kid happy and it’s not costing stan anything so why the hell not?_

_fiddleford hasn’t had one of his really bad episodes in almost three months when stan finally gives in, because even if it’s probably not right to be with a guy who doesn’t remember where he was born or what he did until about thirty years ago, fidds has had most of a year now to convince stan that he knows who he is now, and what he wants now, and stan never claimed to be all that good a person in the first place._

_dipper after the gideon thing, when that little bastard was still just a minor nuisance and not the threat he would become to the shack and to stan’s whole family, coming home with bruises on his arms and a stubborn set to his jaw from the fight at the old factory, and stan knows that look from the inside out and can’t help but like the kid a bit more for it._

It was dizzying, names and faces that suddenly matched – the goat chewing on the end of a broken table was Gompers, the pig sleeping peaceably with all four legs in the air was Waddles – but in all of that, there was still one thing that didn’t add up.

“So, where were you for all this?” he asked, looking over at Ford, who went still.

“What?”

Stan shrugged, “Well, we’ve been through that book from cover to cover now, and I still don’t know the- uh, how the heck you come into all this. I mean…is it sort of a family tradition or something, having twins and then only keeping one of them? Cos that’d be pretty messed up.”

Ford swallowed. “No, no, nothing like that. We, uh, we did grow up together – in New Jersey, unfortunately, but neither of us can help that.”

“I’m a New Jersian? Seriously?” Stan groaned. “So…uh, did you just arrive or something?” Oh, shit, that would be awful. To have turned up to visit your brother and found he no longer remembered who you were. He could see the hurt on Ford’s face already. “Uh…sorry. Guess that kind of sucked for you.”

“For me?” Ford said, and, yep, there was the bitterness. Well, it was bound to come up sooner or later. Stan’d be pretty bitter too if he’d been looking forward to meeting up with his brother for the first time in…probably quite a while, going by the utter lack of photos in Mabel’s scrapbook, even the pages from years back…and he’d had to deal with all this shit.

“Well, yeah,” Stan said, trying to sound casual, “Hoping you weren’t looking forward to it or anything, cos this’d be a pretty shi-” he cast a nervous look at Dipper, who snorted.

“I hear worse language from Mabel,” he said dismissively.

Stan swallowed. Shit, shit, shit, how bad a job had he _done_? “Right. Anyway, it’d make for a pretty shitty reunion.” That, apparently, was also the wrong thing to say. How was it that the guy’s expression could hardly change, and he could _still_ look as though Stan had just kicked his puppy?

“Yes…well…it doesn’t matter. You’re alive, and that’s what counts.” Ford’s voice was a bit too cheerful to be properly believable, dour guy like him, and the tells were all there when Stan looked for him. Still, if Ford wanted to lie, Stan wasn’t about to stop him, he wouldn’t want to be bludgeoned into admitting he was upset either.


	4. In Which Mabel Finds Her People

School isn’t nearly as much fun as gulling the tourists, who come through Gravity Falls in their droves every summer, and in smaller but still significant numbers the rest of the year, but apparently it’s a legal requirement, and given Mabel’s already starting two years after everyone else in town started preschool, Grunkle Stan didn’t think it was such a good idea to let the local truant officer join the long, long (long, long, long, long, long, long, long….) list of law enforcement agencies he’s pissed off over the years. Oh, new hot tip. Teachers take offence when you say things like ‘pissed off’, and the one time Mabel blurted out ‘fuck’ when she caught her fingers in a closing door got her sent to the principal’s office so fast her head spun.

There were two people already there, on what’s turned out to be the first of many, many visits to the principal’s office in the time Mabel’s been going to school in Gravity Falls (which is practically forever, no matter how often she begs Grunkle Stan to just home-school her and let her just take tour groups all the time – apparently school is ‘character-building’, which is how Grunkle Stan always describes things he wouldn’t want to do either) one of them an Asian girl about an inch taller than Mabel, and the other, apparently there just for the sake of contrast, a short, blocky sort of girl with a sullen expression. Now, Mabel’s grown up with a professional con-man. She knows all the tricks – step one, sit down next to the least threatening-looking person in the cell. Step two…

“So, what’re you in for?” she asked brightly.

“I was reading a book instead of paying attention in math class,” said girl number one.

Girl number two scowled. “I broke my chair over some boy’s head. He kept pulling my pigtails.”  
Mabel considered this for a second. That…probably made girl number two the hardest girl in the cell, and thus the person Mabel really ought to be making nice with. “I’m Mabel,” she said, sticking a hand out.

“Grenda,” said girl number two.

Girl number one grinned. “And I am Candy. What did you do?”

“I don’t even know!” Mabel exclaimed, throwing her hands up in the air, “I mean, I got my hand shut in a door, but they can’t punish me for that, right?”

Candy and Grenda glanced at each other, and Candy made a ‘so-so’ sort of gesture.

“They are punishing me for reading,” she said, “I think they can punish for whatever they like.”

“Oh…well…shit.” Mabel kicked her feet, staring down at them. “How much longer are we going to be sitting in here for?”

“Just until the principal has finished with Robbie Valentino,” Candy replied.

Grenda huddled down into her seat. “I’m stuck out here till my parents come get me,” she said moodily. “I didn’t even hit him that hard.”

“Huh, teachers,” Mabel said dismissively, “They’ll try and book you for anything. Deny it all, and maybe that’ll work.”

It didn’t work, as it turned out. The fact that she had said it in front of her whole class, including teacher, and said it more than the once or twice that might excuse a teacher simply not believing what it was she’d heard meant that Mabel would be getting sent home, and after Candy’s brief interview it was starting to seem like the school was just sending them all home so they wouldn’t have to be bothered with them. This was fine with Mabel, and offered a new method to add to Grunkle Stan’s jailbreak list, but it did seem a bit anti-climactic, was all.

There was probably a logical reason why this all ended in Mabel bringing Candy and Grenda back to the Mystery Shack. Admittedly, Mabel couldn’t think for the life of her what that reason was, but there probably was one, or at least that was how she tried to sell it to Grunkle Stan when Grenda’s parents turned up, both spitting mad with worry and not at all pleased to find their daughter had wandered off before they could even get to the school.

That, though, was for later. In the meantime, there was Candy’s little intake of breath as Mabel spread her arms wide to show off the Shack to its best advantage.

“Oh, I’m sorry, we haven’t been formally introduced,” she said, in her best innocent tone, the one the tourists always went mad with cooing over, and swept the deep bow that she usually used to close her tours with “I’m Miss Mystery, and I’m very pleased to meet you.”

Grenda beamed. “Hey! I knew you looked familiar! Aren’t you the girl from the flyers?”

“That’s me!” Mabel beamed at her, “I’ve been here since I was a baby. Grunkle Stan doesn’t talk about it much, but I think my parents are dead. Or secret agents. Or dead secret agents.”

She should, she knew, probably be a bit more upset about that than she was. But…well, she didn’t really know anything about them, there weren’t even any pictures of them in the house, and Grunkle Stan did all the stuff parents were supposed to do anyway.

“Oh…that’s rough,” Grenda said, patting Mabel on the shoulder so hard it made her knees buckle. Mabel shrugged, and wished she hadn’t told them. So far it had only been awkward at school, where everyone assumed it must be difficult or upsetting, when this was the only life and the only family she had ever known.

Grunkle Stan was handling another batch of tourists, so Mabel took Candy and Grenda through herself, giving her usual scripted patter on some exhibits and just chattering away freely about others. She’d helped make most of the newer ones, though she took care to keep her voice down about admitting it with the tourists still in the Shack. It was probably all right to tell Candy and Grenda, though.

“…and out in the forest there are gnomes,” she finished. “Don’t try and take their pointy hats – they bite.”

“I have never seen a gnome,” Candy said curiously.

Mabel frowned at her. “Really? I see them ‘round town all the time – usually near Greasy’s Diner, they like to steal the food there.” Candy looked downcast, and Mabel made a placating sort of gesture. “It’s ok! We can just…hey! There’s all sorts of weird stuff in the woods ‘round here! We could always go exploring sometime?”

“Yeah!” Grenda agreed cheerfully, “Hey, do you reckon there are unicorns?”

The noise Mabel made then was at a pitch only technically audible to dogs, bats and the shadow government, but the point more or less got through.

“I’ve found my people,” she whispered exultantly, just as Grenda’s parents’ car drew up outside the Mystery Shack, and two very annoyed larger versions of Grenda got out.


	5. In Which Unwanted Rescues Occur

Of course it had to be Mabel Pines who rescued her from the gnomes. It wasn’t bad enough that she had to go home looking like she’d been dragged through a hedge backwards, no, Mabel Pines had to see her like that, tied up lengthways by a bunch of creepy little men in pointy hats, red-faced and breathless from screaming for someone to come and rescue her. It wasn’t exactly the sort of image anyone wanted the Northwest family to have, least of all her father. If it had been anyone but Mabel Pines, Pacifica might have been able to bully them into never speaking of this again, but one irritating quality of the Pines family, who lived in their creepy little hut outside of town and didn’t seem to give a damn what _anyone_ thought of them, was that they were very difficult people to bully.

“So, where should I drop you off?” Mabel asked brightly, taking her eyes off the forest in front of them to grin at Pacifica and accelerating as she did so. Pacifica still wasn’t sure how she’d made it to twelve without crashing into a tree.

“Oh, please, as if I’d ride in this piece of junk any longer than I had to. Just let me out as soon as we’re away from those things and maybe I won’t tell everyone at your school you actually like that dumb hat your uncle makes you wear.”

“Eh, they all know that anyway,” Mabel said, shrugging. “I think wearing it all the time was a bit of a giveaway.”

Oh. That was a bit more of a problem. Four years away at boarding school and Pacifica had fallen out of the loop when it came to the local losers, it seemed. And, logically, Mabel Pines would be considered a loser. She was loud and tacky and obsessed with glitter, her family were…well, even when not running their little roadside scam they were a freak-show…and that wasn’t even getting into all the weirdness she kept getting mixed up in, though Pacifica wasn’t in much of a position to comment on that, under present circumstances.

“So, back to town?” Mabel offered, “I don’t think the gnomes’ll try again – they didn’t with Grenda, anyway.”

That at least sounded reassuring, although… “Wait, they went for lizard-girl over me? Isn’t she, like, twice your size?”

“Hey, if I had the choice I’d marry Grenda ahead of you too,” Mabel said agreeably, taking a sharp swerve around a particularly large tree.

Pacifica scowled. “That isn’t even legal,” she said sourly. Admittedly, neither was marrying woodpeckers in most of the rest of the world, but it had been a long, long while since anyone had done that in Gravity Falls either.

Mabel made a dismissive sort of noise, “Yeah, well, I’m not planning on marrying Grenda either – she wouldn’t have me even if I did want to. Just saying I understand why the gnomes would go for her ahead of the resident walking one-dimensional bleached-blonde valley girl stereotype.”

“ _What_ did you just call me?”

“You heard m- Shit!”

Pacifica opened her mouth to demand an apology for being subjected to this sort of rudeness – the swearing or the valley-girl comment; she honestly didn’t know which – when she saw them, up ahead. More gnomes, dozens of them, were standing on each other’s shoulders in a line across the road almost as high as the body of the Pines family golf-cart, blocking their way out.

“There’s a shovel in the back,” Mabel cried, pulling off a neat hairpin turn and shooting off into the forest, “They’ll start throwing themselves at us next.”

Pacifica thought it would be a rare person who could avoid throwing themselves at Mabel Pines, but stopped herself right there. Mabel was about as far below her as it was possible to be, half a step up from a carny and bizarrely proud to be so. What would it be like, Pacifica wondered, to have that little to be proud of, and still act like it was bigger than the whole Northwest family legacy a hundred times over? She’d never asked, not even when the two of them were still on somewhat friendly – well, not actively adversarial – terms. But that had been a long time ago, before Pacifica had gone away to boarding school and finally, finally started living up to her parents’ expectations.

She’d been not quite eight when she met Mabel Pines, and still a disappointment. Put simply, she’d been a loser. Too loud was _gauche_ , yes, but too quiet could be just as bad, or so her father had kept reminding her. Pacifica had tried, but she hadn’t been used to people and she hadn’t been used to noise. Somehow, she always ended up startling or saying the wrong thing or just generally embarrassing herself and her parents with her mousiness and her not-quite-blonde-enough hair and her inability to get people to listen to what she had to say. And, to seven-year-old Pacifica, whose tastes hadn’t been properly refined yet and who hadn’t seen enough of the world to know better, Mabel Pines had seemed like a small whirlwind of glitter and craft-store jewellery and intriguingly foul language.

She’d known about the Mystery Shack before that, from one of her first nannies who still remembered when it had been the Murder Hut, and the main draw that Stanford Pines was rumoured to have been a serial killer, now attempting to recapture his glory days by re-enacting his more interesting murders and giving tours of the house he’d committed them in. Pacifica didn’t think she’d believed it even then, but it made no odds, as that nanny had been dismissed as soon as Preston Northwest found out about the stories she’d been using to keep Pacifica in line. He did not, he said, wish to hear about _those people_ in his home. After that, Pacifica had kept her mouth shut about things she heard, though she did still like to hear, from Tiffany and the bare handful of other kids her own age she was allowed to mix with in Gravity Falls, about the Mystery Shack and about the glorious tacky strangeness of it all. And, of course, when Miss Mystery became a regular feature, and Mabel Pines started school alongside them, she heard about that, too, albeit mostly through complaints. Mabel Pines used more glitter on a single craft project than most people would be content seeing in their entire lives. Mabel Pines said things that enraged teachers without ever seeming to realise she was doing anything wrong. Mabel Pines took in strays left, right and centre, from rats found in the street to what Tiffany swore right up until she forgot all about it looked like a large eyeball with wings. None of them lasted long, as pets went, for one reason or another, except for Old Man McGucket, whom Mabel had practically dragged back to the Mystery Shack with her the winter before she and Pacifica finally met and who was still living there when Pacifica got abducted by gnomes five years later.

Their actual first meeting had happened in the spring, about a week before Pacifica’s birthday. She’d started boarding school the following fall, having never set foot in a school of any kind before, barely talked to anyone but her nannies, tutors or the various ‘appropriate’ friends her parents selected from the better class of townsfolk. Her last nanny had already been dismissed by then, and she was between tutors after her father had taken offence at something the last one had said, so there was no-one to notice her slipping out of the Northwest Manor, huddled into an overlarge hoodie stolen out of the staff laundry with the hood drawn up to hide her face, and taking the bus to the Mystery Shack.

The place was…kind of underwhelming, really, after all she’d heard about it. ‘Shack’ was certainly the right word for it – it looked like it might fall apart in a stiff wind, and she could already hear her mother’s haughty sniff at the sight of it. _Déclassé_ , she’d call it, even if Pacifica wasn’t quite sure the word really fit this rundown little place in the middle of the woods.

“Next tour in five minutes!” came a yell from inside, and Pacifica fished in her pocket for the money she’d brought along – barely anything, how did anyone expect to make a business work if they were asking for that little, no wonder the place looked like it was falling apart – as she followed the rest of the small crowd of tourists to the stand where the tour guide would receive them. And waited. And waited. And waited. She was just starting to wonder whether anyone was going to turn up at all when there was a _pop_ from up ahead, a puff of suspiciously glittery smoke, and a girl who had probably been hiding behind/inside the podium this whole time appeared behind it, beaming from ear to ear.

“Hello, ladies and gentlemen!” she said brightly, sweeping an elaborate bow with a swirl of her star-patterned cape. “Welcome to the Mystery Shack! I’m Miss Mystery, and I’m very pleased to meet you!” There was a general murmur of ‘aww’, and Mabel smiled brightly as she drew herself up and clapped her hands together for silence. Pacifica was barely listening to the general warnings about possible dangers, refunds or the lack thereof, and any suspicious mechanical noises they might hear were probably just Old Man McGucket repairing the roof-mounted death ray, and therefore nothing to worry about. Her eyes were still fixed on Mabel, taking it in – the confidence, the showman’s swagger and the open, joyous silliness that should’ve been laughable, but wasn’t. Or…not in the way Pacifica was used to. She was used to laughing _at_ silliness, with Tiffany and the rest, laughing at the likes of Old Man McGucket or Toby Determined and all the ridiculousness they brought with them. But Mabel laughed and the world laughed with her, she made a fool of herself and somehow no-one called her a fool. She spat in the face of everything Pacifica knew about how the world was supposed to work, and she didn’t even seem to realise she was doing it.

The tour was…all right, Pacifica supposed. Low-rent, but that was only to be expected, and some of the exhibits were actually pretty funny. But it was that…that confidence that really caught her eye. Mabel seemed to have an answer for everything and, ok, it was often a pretty silly answer, but even then she had the audience eating out of the palm of her hand and it was like…like watching magic going on in front of her, knowing that there was a trick there but not what it was or how it was done, because no-one could be like that all the time, could they? She lingered in the gift shop, afterwards, more out of awkwardness than any real desire to buy anything – what would be the point? It’d only cause more trouble if her parents found out where she’d been.

She was just wondering whether she’d been gone long enough now that they’d notice, and what the punishment would be if they had, when an elbow nudged playfully against her side.

“Hey,” came a cheerful voice, “I’m Mabel!”

Pacifica flinched, and looked around at Miss Mystery, who was standing right there, her hands tucked neatly behind her back and the question-mark headband in her hair ever so slightly askew.

“Um…hi?” she said weakly, and kicked herself for it. She’d never been any good at this bit, not without someone there to remind her that she was a _Northwest_ , and needed to act like one. “I…that was a really great tour back there.”

“Thanks! I practiced for ages!” Miss Mystery- Mabel bounced a little on her feet, still grinning. “So…what’re you looking at?”

“Um…I’m not, really,” Pacifica admitted, “I…I’m not really supposed to be here.”

Mabel made a sort of interested, sympathetic noise. “I go places I’m not supposed to all the time,” she said brightly, “People don’t notice that much.”

Pacifica swallowed. It was now or never. “How do you do it?” she asked.

“Do what?” Mabel asked, guileless brown eyes shining.

“All…all that out there.” Pacifica’s fingers twisted in her lap, “I…I’d never be able to do something like that.”

Mabel elbowed her, “No, of course you could – I wasn’t always as big a badass as I am today, you know. The trick is to _act_ like you know what you’re doing, even if you don’t – don’t tell anyone, but I fucked up a few of my lines on that tour, and no-one seemed to notice, did they?”

“You did?” Pacifica blinked. “Wait – it’s that simple?”

“Make believe you’re brave, and the trick will take you far,” Mabel chanted, sing-song, “You can be as brave as you make believe you are. I got that off one of Soos’s grandma’s old movies,” she added, “It really works, too.”

“…does it?”

Mabel nodded, and looked like she was going to say more when there came a shout from the other side of the gift shop. “Tourists incoming!” and Mabel had to hare off with one last apologetic smile at Pacifica before starting her next tour.

Pacifica had never mentioned that first meeting to Mabel afterwards. Probably she didn’t even remember it. She’d gone away to school and she’d put that advice into effect every single day until it became natural. And then she’d come home the next summer, and it hadn’t been any more difficult. It was easier, in fact, because Gravity Falls was smaller than she’d thought it was, and everything that had seemed exciting and new before was small and shabby by comparison, and even if she never dared go to the Mystery Shack again, she knew it’d just be more of the same. When she ran into Mabel the next time it was on the lake, Mabel and her two weird uncles and the handyman who works at the Mystery Shack, and Mabel looked right past her as if Pacifica wasn’t there at all. So Pacifica had said something barbed to catch her attention, because she couldn’t risk anything else with her parents there, and after that it had become a habit to try and come up with something biting to say whenever she saw Mabel, because at least then Mabel will actually _look_ at her, even if it is only to glare.

Now, rocketing through the woods at high speed with a small army of gnomes after her, Pacifica rather wished she’d found time to ask about, say, what you were supposed to do when dealing with this situation and whether that roof-mounted death ray was a) still there and b) worked on gnomes. Were they even going in the right direction for the Mystery Shack?

“Where are we even going?” she demanded.

Mabel veered sharply to avoid a rain of gnomes, “The main road! Your place has those really big walls and that spiky gate, right?”

“Uh, yeah? Wait, you’re not going to try and deal with the gnomes before that?”

“What-? Nah, they’ll give up if they can’t catch up with you, and they don’t want to get on the wrong side of Grunkle Fidds’ roof-mounted stun ray again, so they’re unlikely to come looking for revenge.”

“ _Stun_ ray? I thought it was a death ray!”

Mabel grinned. “So you _have_ been to the Shack before! Yeah, that’s just for the tourists – Grunkle Stan didn’t want any risk of killing off customers before they could buy anything.”

“…your family is weird.”

“Yep!” Mabel grinned, and spun the wheel, sending them off through the woods – they were nearly at the road now, which was probably good – “So, which would you rather? Back to the Shack and get your parents or your butler or someone to pick you up, or dropped off back at your place?”

Pacifica considered for a moment what her parents would do to her if they found her anywhere near the Mystery Shack. “My house, please,” she said, and swallowed against the knowledge that she’d be in for it anyway if her parents saw what sort of a state she was in.


	6. In Which Dipper Catches A Clue

It was difficult to concentrate on Grunkle Fidds’ warnings in the face of everything this evening had thrown at him, and if he’d been a little less delighted by how the evening had turned out Dipper might have felt a bit guilty about that, because…well, Grunkle Fidds wouldn’t have erased most of his own memory if it hadn’t been important, would he? Well, not the Grunkle Fidds who’d appeared in the first few memories, anyway. But…well, tonight was supposed to be a night off now that the ghost was dealt with, and say what you liked about Pacifica’s family, they knew how to throw a party. Pacifica herself had popped back up as soon as she’d been able to find someone to take away her mother’s favourite carpet to be cleaned, and Dipper was just wondering whether he ought to say something else about the whole ‘saving him (and also the party) from a ghost’ thing, when he saw which way her gaze was starting to drift. Dipper was not, he would admit, the best judge of human behaviour the world had ever seen, but he wasn’t that big of an idiot either.

“So, you and my sister,” he said, by way of an opening line.

Pacifica’s head whipped around, “What?” she demanded. She was already starting to blush, Dipper noticed with some amusement, which undermined her pose a bit. “ _Please_. As if. Even if I _were_ into girls that way, my standards would be higher than a girl whose brightest career option is being a glorified carnival barker.”

“Hey, that’s my sister you’re talking about there,” Dipper said warningly, “And the way you were staring at her just now says different. Admit it, you’ve got a thing for her.”

Pacifica gave a soft, disgusted sort of sigh, and he thought she was going to deny it for a moment, when her eyes found Mabel again, and she let out a long breath. “Please don’t tell my parents – I’m going to be in more trouble than ever already without them finding out about this.” There was something panicked in her voice now, and all of a sudden Dipper remembered the bell Preston Northwest had rung when she started trying to apologise earlier, the one that had made Pacifica go quiet and docile in a way Dipper had never seen her before.

“Ok, ok, your secret’s safe with me. Just saying, though…Mabel’s not the sort who’d take offence if you did happen to have a bit of a thing for her. And, y’know, since your parents seem to be a bit busy right now…” he nodded over at Preston Northwest, who was disappearing out of the ballroom at an alarming speed, accompanied by a handful of the more horrified-looking guests.

“I’ve spent the last four summers making fun of her every time I saw her,” Pacifica said dully, “I don’t think one instance of having to be saved from a bunch of sentient golf balls is going to help my case.”

“Oh, don’t be like that, Mabel’s not the type to hold a grudge – hell, she was more willing to forgive you after the mini-golf thing than I was, don’t let her fool you.”

“Really?” Pacifica stole another glance, and this time Dipper looked too. Personally he didn’t see what it was Pacifica found so very appealing about Mabel and Candy bickering good-naturedly over who would be the more senior bridesmaid at Grenda’s wedding to Mr Obscenely Wealthy Austrian Baron, which even to Dipper seemed like they were getting a bit ahead of themselves. Then again, let he who had never made a fool of himself over Wendy throw the first stone. Pacifica groaned. “You tell anyone about this, not only will I deny it, but I’ll also tell them that you needed me to rescue from the ghost you were hired to exorcise,” she said sourly.

“Yeah, I know.” Dipper shrugged. “Oh, and Pacifica?” he added, as Pacifica took a long gulp of her drink and set it down on the tray of a passing waiter, “Hurt my sister and I’ll set a horde of zombies on you.”

Pacifica snorted. “Please, like you could. You couldn’t even handle one ghost.”

“Keep saying that,” Dipper muttered, watching her go. Well, she was no worse than any of the other people who’d expressed an interest in Mabel over the summer. Better than Gideon, anyway, and Mabel’s rants about _perfect_ Pacifica with her perfect life, her perfect mini-golf scores, her perfect hair, her perfect mouth, her perfect _face_ sounded disturbingly like a more aggressive version of the way she’d got over that boyband thing a few weeks back, only with more swearing and less screeching. End of story, Mabel deserved to meet someone who wasn’t secretly a psychopath, a bunch of gnomes/clones/both, married to a manatee or prone to disturbingly affectionate behaviour towards hand-puppets.

And, in the meantime, that left Candy tantalisingly off on her own, as Mabel grabbed Pacifica by the hand and dragged her out onto the dancefloor alongside Grenda and her new would-be boyfriend. Dipper had been meaning to talk to her for a while, ever since the whole thing with the Bunker, about what the hell that shape-shifter thing had been, where it had come from and whether there were any more like it out there. It wasn’t exactly a usual activity at this sort of party, he was pretty sure, but this was Gravity Falls, and most of what was going on here tonight wasn’t exactly usual for the sort of party the Northwests would rather have thrown. No-one, least of all Mabel, seemed to mind.


	7. In Which Stan Occupies A Certain River In Egypt

The winter after Mabel turned seven was one of the hardest Gravity Falls had seen since Stan started living there, and even if that wasn’t quite as long as everyone thought it was, twenty-five years was still nothing to sniff at. The thought hurt. Twenty-five years, and he was getting closer, but it was still twenty-five years too many. Business slowed to a crawl, because few enough people wanted to go on road trips in this sort of weather and the locals weren’t exactly keen to go all the way into the woods just for another visit to the Mystery Shack. Stan was used to that by now – winter was always the off-season in this business – but that didn’t make it any less frustrating. Before Mabel, he’d spent his winters down in the basement, spending every waking hour with the portal. And even if he knew, logically, that he couldn’t do that with Mabel there, he could still hear his pop’s voice in the back of his mind, reminding him that he should be working on the portal or running the shack and not sprawled out on the floor playing board games, or watching television and trying not to think about just how much more still needed to be done. At the very least, the off-season meant Mabel didn’t spend as much time down at the junkyard with Old Man McGucket, even if the old kook did seem to be mostly harmless these days. Stan still remembered the giant shame-bot that had rampaged across most of what passed for the downtown area in this one-horse town, and the killer pterodactyl-thing a year or so after he’d arrived in town, and if Mabel got caught up in another killer robot incident, he didn’t know what he’d do except that it wouldn’t end well for McGucket.

Her friends weren’t around as much in the winter – Grenda’s grandparents lived back on the east coast, and the family preferred to spend the holidays with them, and Candy had her own array of family events and responsibilities to worry about – and it wasn’t hard to keep her occupied around the shack, even with her latest attempt at keeping a pet having escaped back into the forest nearby. Winter tended to be knitting season for Mabel, though she sewed all year round, and if you kept her supplied with yarn the knitwear tended to pile up after a while, everything from scarves to sweaters. But, in the end, the yarn had to run out sometime even if Stan had bought in bulk as soon as the weather started to turn, and Mabel finally announced she needed to top up her supply in the last week of December, which at least missed a lot of the holiday closures. Stan had hoped he could promise a trip into town the next day and that would be the end of it, despite the possibility of snow blocking the roads, but then.

“Oh! And I’ll be able to give Old Man McGucket the sweater I said I was going to make him!”

Stan groaned. “Uh…sweetie? I don’t think he’s going to want…”

“But- But it’s really cold out there, and those overalls he always wears won’t help.” She stared up at him, brown eyes filling with crocodile tears the way they always did when she wanted to scam him out of something. (If it weren’t so much trouble he’d be proud that she’d picked up on that so quickly.) “At least let me drop it off at the dump for him before we go?”

Stan considered this, “You sure you wouldn’t rather go…I don’t know, play mini-golf or something?” Mabel glared at him, and Stan sighed. “Fine. Let’s go…give the crazy hillbilly a sweater.” Maybe if he didn’t wear it Mabel would be upset enough to stop hanging around the guy so Stan didn’t have to worry about her potentially getting crushed by giant robots. Well, he could always hope, right?

The drive into town was quiet, as most of the really weird stuff wasn’t all that good at moving in snow this thick and that was just the way Stan preferred it.  Well, quiet in the sense of the car wasn’t stopped by anything, and not in the sense that there was no noise, as Stan had never dealt all that well with anything being too quiet, and so the car was filled with the sound of his own slightly off-key singing. Mabel, though, was uncharacteristically serious as she stared out at the snow-capped trees and the deep drifts on either side of the road. Stan couldn’t help but feel a bit ashamed himself. He wasn’t McGucket’s biggest fan – too many of those robots had come too close to the Mystery Shack for that – but he wouldn’t want to be living rough in that weather, and that scrap-metal hut in the junkyard would be even worse than Stan’s old car for warmth. Still, if the guy wouldn’t even accept help from his own son, there’d be little enough Mabel could do for him.

The mall was, predictably, heaving, the allure of the post-holiday sales having brought out the townsfolk of Gravity Falls in their droves. The arts-and-crafts store was probably the one place that wasn’t dealing with a horde of crazed shoppers – it almost made Stan wish he’d set up closer to town so he could get in on it, but that’d never really been a possibility at all. Mabel spent so long choosing yarn that Stan almost hoped she’d forget about the whole McGucket thing by the time they were out, but of course that wouldn’t be what happened. The kid was like a pit bull that way, a very small, very colourful pit bull with a glitter fixation.

“Grunkle Stan! You’re going the wrong way, the dump is _that_ way!”

Stan sighed. Well, so much for that idea. “You really don’t want to be talked out of this, do you?” he said exhaustedly. “Ok, ok, let’s do this.”

The dump looked oddly clean like this, buried beneath however many feet of snow, the sign over the gate proclaiming to anyone who happened to be interested that ‘it’s a real dump!’ Well, Stan couldn’t argue with that one. In all of that, Old Man McGucket’s miserable corrugated-iron shack stood buried, the only sign of what it was the slight gaps here and there which Stan presumed were meant to be doors and windows. He shuddered. Stan did not think the words ‘there but for the grace of god goes Stan Pines’, but he thought the thought. One or two different decisions, a bit less luck in some places and a bit more in others, and that could’ve been him. Instead, he had a business, a roof over his head that only leaked some of the time, at least one employee who seemed to think Stan was the greatest thing the world had ever seen and a little girl who tagged along at his heels like a puppy. It didn’t seem right, somehow, but there it was. If ‘deserving’ had ever had anything to do with it, Ford would’ve got to go to that dumb college and Stan…well, god alone knew what Stan would be doing. Probably still on the grift, trying to find a state he wasn’t banned in and probably failing without the thirty years he’d spent lying low here in Oregon.

“Mr McGucket!” Mabel called, racing ahead, “Mr McGucket! It’s Mabel! I brought that sweater I promised you! Mr McGucket?”

She pushed aside the ragged curtain that served as McGucket’s front door and ducked inside, and Stan followed, though he had to drop to his hands and knees to fit through the narrow opening, and even then it was tight. Inside, the place was…well, kind of a wreck. Stan took one look at the tattered old clippings from the Gravity Falls Gossiper pinned up on the far wall, then wished he hadn’t. And…ok, Stan liked laughing at human misery as much as the next guy, but wasn’t that kind of overdoing it? Not like there wasn’t enough of it out there without picking on the likes of the old guy who’d been living in the dump for almost as long as Stan had been in Gravity Falls. Hell, how old _was_ the guy? His son was somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five, by Stan’s reckoning, so that put some limits on it, but he’d looked about as ancient twenty-five years ago as he had done the last time Stan passed him getting chased out of Greasy’s Diner.

Mabel, though, had gone still, one hand going up to her mouth “…oh, no.”

“What is it, sweetie?” Stan asked, looking over, but the question was rendered useless as soon as he saw. Old Man McGucket was lying half-curled on his side under a filthy, ragged blanket, his lips blue and his thin frame shaking with fever. “Oh.”

Mabel was already tugging at the blanket, “We can’t leave him like this!” she said desperately, “Grunkle Stan!”

“What- Oh, no- Look, kid…”

Mabel stared beseechingly up at him, and even though Stan knew that look was the biggest scam in the whole damn Mystery Shack, himself excepted, it didn’t make any difference. Half an hour later, they were back in the car, with a half-dead hillbilly curled up under a quilt on the back seat, and Stan never thought he’d have cause to be relieved that eleven years on the grift didn’t go away even after twenty-five years with a roof over his head, at least enough that he still kept a couple of blankets in the trunk just in case. McGucket’s breath was coming quick and shallow and far, far too loud in the quiet of Stan’s car, and even if Stan could’ve gone back and made it so they’d never been to the junkyard and found the old guy in that state, he wouldn’t have. He didn’t especially like the idea of sleeping on the couch while McGucket recovered enough to go back to…fuck, to the dump…but Mabel would insist on getting the old hillbilly to an actual bed, and he wasn’t going to have her sleeping downstairs where she might see more than she ought.

It took three days after that for McGucket to come round enough to talk. Three days of trying to remember his ma’s recipe for tomato soup that she’d always made whenever he or Ford or Shermie were ill, and that she’d probably made for Sharon, whom Stan still thought of as a baby even thirty years later, as well after he was gone. Three days of Mabel sitting up with McGucket instead of taking her tours and charming the punters until his fever went down enough to be safe. Three days of racking coughs and bloody phlegm on the bedsheets before it seemed to die down, though McGucket’s body still shook and his lips were still touched with blue. For the worst of it, his eyes were open but his wits had wandered further even than usual. He babbled at the air – about how sorry he was, about how he was sorry things had come to this, about forgetfulness and equations and _eyes_ – talking so fast and snapping from one topic to another so suddenly that it sounded like gibberish, but probably wasn’t, knowing this town. That was half the reason Stan had kept his silence as long as he had: even disregarding the danger the actual weirdness around here caused, those freaks in the red robes that tended to pop up whenever anyone admitted to seeing anything weird scared the life out of him. He’d managed to bullshit well enough the one time he’d run into them, that he’d been drunk and seeing things and _of course_ he didn’t really believe there’d been little bearded men digging through his trash, but he’d sat up afraid at night for a week after that because if they got wind of what was underneath the Mystery Shack there went his only hope of getting his brother back. In the end, though, McGucket woke up on the fourth day and seemed no more irrational than usual, which probably meant the worst was over.

“You’re awake, then?” Stan said gruffly, putting the tray down next to the bed and wishing he’d thought to buy a chair.

McGucket blinked. “…Uh, I reckon so,” he said, staring curiously around, “I don’t recognise this place, though.”

“No reason you would, you’re at the Mystery Shack.” Stan rubbed awkwardly at the back of his neck. “I was all for leaving you where you were, but the kid insisted.” And…well. Stan might not be the best person out there, but there were some things he wouldn’t inflict on a dog in this weather.

“Well…thanks, I guess,” McGucket said, “Well! Guess I’ll be going now – give my best to your little girl, will you? But I’d better scrabdoodle back to the dump before that hillbilly what lives in my mirror thinks he’s got a claim to the rest of the house.”

Stan groaned. This guy, honestly. It didn’t last long, as no sooner had McGucket tried to sit up and get out of bed than he was overwhelmed by a bout of harsh, hacking coughs, splattering mucus, thankfully without blood in it this time, all over Stan’s floor, large globs of it catching in his long white beard.

“Hey! Watch it! You’re not leaving this house until you’re not going to keel over as soon as you get out the door, Mabel’s orders.”

“What…Mabel?” McGucket’s face twisted a little in confusion. “I don’t…”

Stan stared at him, “C’mon, McGucket, stop messing around. You know who Mabel is.” He ought to, she visited him nearly every day. Or…she had done, before the holidays started and the snow had kept them shut up in the Shack for weeks.

“Mr McGucket!” came a cheerful voice from the doorway, and Mabel appeared in a sort of brightly-coloured blur to perch on the bed, “You’re awake!” she said excitedly, and offered a hand. “I’m Mabel!”

McGucket grinned toothlessly at her. “Fiddleford Hadron McGucket, pleased to meet you” he said, wringing her hand. He seemed genuinely delighted to see her, and Stan couldn’t help but soften towards the guy a bit, just for that.

“I know,” Mabel said, her smile dropping, just a little. “You don’t remember right now, but we’ve talked a lot before – I’m sorry I’ve been away.”

“Aw…” McGucket waved a hand, “Don’t mention it. My own son’s not visited me in months…” More like years, Stan thought, and felt an uncomfortable surge of pity.

Mabel smiled back, “I brought a scrapbook,” she said brightly, “If you want something to read while you’re all…ick…” she produced said scrapbook with a flourish, “Look, on page three are the designs for that rabbit-unicorn robot I helped with last fall,”

“I…I don’t recall,” McGucket said helplessly.

Mabel just smiled, “I know you don’t, and that’s ok. You never do if I’ve been away for a couple days. Just look at the scrapbook and tell me if you remember anything – it’s ok if you don’t,” she added quickly. “Just, if you do…”

“You sure that’s going to work, sweetie?” Stan asked, frowning. He hadn’t known it was McGucket who gave Mabel the bunnicorn idea. She’d just produced the blueprints and then Stan, Soos and Mabel had had their share of fun putting the damn thing together. But, then again, the guy was good at mechanical robot animals, so maybe it shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

Mabel nodded. “It doesn’t always, but that’s why I keep adding things to the scrapbook – there are the blueprints, and that’s a sketch of Mr McGucket’s raccoon, and there’s a picture of him and his son making up…”

“But we _haven’t_ made up,” McGucket said, sounding bewildered.

Mabel looked downcast for a moment, “I know! I just…I wanted to make you feel better about Ranger McGucket being a big jerk.”

“Hey! Don’t talk ‘bout my boy that way!” McGucket said, and glanced away, “I wouldn’t want to come see me either, if I had a dad like me.”

And, yeah, Stan knew that feeling from the inside out. He told himself firmly that he was not feeling sorry for the crazy old man who damn near trampled the Mystery Shack with a killer robot that one time, but it didn’t seem to be working all that well. He left them to it – there was inventory to stock, attractions to dream up ready for the spring, and a portal that still needed so, _so_ much work. He didn’t go up to see McGucket again until that evening, when Mabel insisted on Stan taking up another tray. It was still just soup, but chicken this time. Stan still wasn’t quite sure he’d done it right, but whatever, food was food.

McGucket was sitting up in bed when he got there, looking at once very old and very young in a way that made Stan’s stomach twist uncomfortably.

“Do I know you?” he said, frowning up at Stan.

Stan shrugged, setting the tray down, “I’ve seen you round town occasionally, if that’s what you mean.”

McGucket’s frown deepened. “You sure that was it? I’ve got the strangest feeling I’ve been here before,”

“Well, you haven’t,” Stan said bluntly, and then, just to change the subject. “Uh…why’ve you got a bandage on your beard?”

“What…huh,” McGucket lifted his beard and peered at it, “I can’t see a dang thing, Mr…you’re Mabel’s dad, ain’t you? That’d make you Mr Pines.”

“I’m her uncle,” Stan corrected gruffly. “But yeah, that’s me.” He considered the sticking plaster stuck in McGucket’s beard. Oh, hell, it wasn’t his business. Better yet, he could just tell Mabel, give her someone else to focus on when she inevitably got stir-crazy enough to want to start giving out makeovers.

“Oh. Parents shuffled off this mortal coil, did they? That’s right sad.” McGucket craned his neck, as if trying to see Mabel through the closed door. “…Pines…Pines…” he shook his head. “Right on the tip of my tongue for a minute there…aw, well, it couldn’t have been anything that important.”

Stan sighed. “You’re here until you heal up, then…I don’t know…” he said, because…well, he wasn’t going to kick the guy out into the snow-filled nightmare outside. Stan still had nightmares about being homeless in weather like that. “Maybe when things clear up a bit Mabel’s going to try and find you a place in town somewhere. I suppose if I called your son…Trent, isn’t it?”

“Tate,” McGucket corrected, almost absent-mindedly, then shook his head. “Aw, he wouldn’t want me there anyway. I tried, once,” he added, and furrowed his brow. “Was it once? Did he slam the door on me or let me eat outside or…what was the other thing?”

Stan glowered. He’d have taken his own pop in like a shot, if he’d been in Tate McGucket’s shoes, and given what his pop had done…strange, but he’d never thought of that as the wrong thing before, but now…well, now Stan had Mabel, and he couldn’t imagine anything she could do, up to and including cold-blooded murder, that would be bad enough to make him kick her out. Anyway, fact was that it was pretty fucking cold to let your own dad nearly freeze to death, even if he was the town loon. Stan told himself once again not to get sappy, that McGucket would be gone as soon as the weather cleared up enough it wouldn’t feel like throwing him to the wolves.

By the time the snow had melted, Fiddleford was still there, though it had taken some doing what with him trying to wander off almost from the moment he’d been well enough to walk again – and that was another thing. At what point, Stan had to ask himself, had Old Man McGucket become ‘Fiddleford’? Mabel was back in school by then, and people had started trickling back up to the Shack to see what new things Stan had dreamt up over the holidays. And…well, the pneumonia was mostly gone, even if Fiddleford’s cough was still painful to listen to, and he definitely _wanted_ to help…Stan didn’t see the harm in letting him tinker, and the guy was smart as a whip with a screwdriver in his hands even if his memory was shot to hell. That was, they had found out pretty quickly, the major issue. Fiddleford had his everyday routines, but…well, living in the dump and all…it wasn’t exactly brilliant for a guy’s mental stability, was what Stan was trying to get at here. Stan hadn’t quite realised how bad it was until a couple of weeks after Fiddleford arrived when he asked, quite casually one morning over breakfast, where Stan slept.

“I’ve been looking around,” he said earnestly, “Or trying to, and it seems to me there ain’t rightly enough room for three people unless I’m missing something.”

Stan almost dropped his coffee. “What d’you mean?” he demanded, “You know where my room – or you should, you’ve been sleeping in there long enough.”

“Oh. Then where’ve you been these last couple weeks since I got sick? You don’t have to sleep on the couch on my account.” Fiddleford grinned toothlessly at him, and Stan reminded himself to get the guy to a damn dentist at some point soon. Just so he wouldn’t scare customers away, of course, he thought, though even in his own head it was a pretty weak justification for spending that much money on some stranger he’d only taken in because Mabel had badgered him into it.

Stan shifted uncomfortably, “Yeah…guess if you’re staying we ought to get another bed in or something…”

“No need for that,” Fiddleford said, and later Stan would kick himself for not noticing the over-eager, defensive note to his voice, or realising the nature of the misunderstanding. “Like Mabel says, sharing’s a fine thing, and last I looked you had to part with some of that green papery stuff what I’m not allowed t’ mop up engine grease with before anyone’ll give you a bedstead.”

“Hmm…guess you noticed that much, huh,” Stan grumbled, “Ok, ok, but if you steal the covers I’m letting you sleep on the couch and I don’t care what Mabel says.”

Fiddleford nodded amiably, “Fair enough,” he said, and then. “D’you know where I used to get my scrap metal from? I’ve had an idea ‘bout a new exhibit for the Shack…”

“Uh…the dump, I think,” Stan said, floundering. And then, because he wouldn’t be Stanley Pines if he didn’t. “What’s this new idea? It doesn’t involve…ugh…robots, does it?”

“Don’t you like robots?”

Stan rolled his eyes, “Not homicidal pterodactyl-trons, I don’t.”

“Oh.” Fiddleford’s face fell, but he brightened again suddenly, “This one’s going to be good, though – it’s a centicorn suit, see? Four legs, something glittery for a tail…possibly a matching wig…and there you are! It’s half-centaur, half-unicorn…what d’you think?”

It was a pretty neat idea, Stan had to admit, and Mabel would go mad over it, but he’d seen far, far too many of McGucket’s ideas go too badly wrong to let all that pent-up energy loose on the Shack.

“It’s not too bad, I guess,” he settled on in the end, “So…who’s going to be wearing that contraption?”

Fiddleford shrugged, “No idea. Mabel sounded interested, though, and so did those friends of hers…now what’re they called again?”

“Candy and Grenda,” Stan supplied. Still, remembering he’d met them before was definitely an improvement, even if it was only because they’d just dropped in to pick up Mabel for another of their jaunts into the woods and the names were still fresh in Fiddleford’s mind. “I don’t know, Fidds,” he said, rubbing at the back of his neck, the nickname slipping out so easily he almost didn’t notice it. “You haven’t exactly got the best record with this sort of thing…”

Fiddleford waved an airy hand, “Oh, I’ve created a couple of humdingers in my time, don’t you fret. ‘Sides, all them things did what they was supposed do, didn’t they?”

Well, there was no arguing with that one. Fidds might be crazy, but he was a damn good mechanic when he wanted to be. It almost made Stan want to know what it was that brought him to this nowhere town in the first place, but…well, it wasn’t like Fiddleford remembered. On balance, he probably shouldn’t have encouraged it, but within three weeks there was the centicorn, which lasted until Grenda, Mabel and Candy got into a vicious fight over who got to wear it and the thing ended up crashing. Within another month, there was the roof-mounted death ray, which was good right up until it went off by accident on some dumb kid trying to egg the shack and set fire to the tree the idiot had been standing next to, when it had to be reworked into the roof-mounted stun ray. Either way, the tourists ate it up, and target-shooting at the gnomes was always a good idea, right? Well, Soos and Mabel seemed to like it, anyway. After all that…well, he’d be a fool to get rid of the guy! Bits of mad-science-y machinery were one hell of a crowd-pleaser, and…well, it was nice to have someone else around the place that was actually old enough to drink.

Stan probably should’ve realised how far in he was on the first morning after he stopped sleeping on the couch and got at least half of his own bed back. He wasn’t what you’d call a deep sleeper, he’d spent too many years on the road for that, when a sleeping man was an easy target. And, more and more lately, he’d found he needed less and less sleep to go on as usual, so going to bed at two in the morning and waking up at six wasn’t even that bad so far as his sleeping habits went What was a bit more awkward was waking up with Fiddleford Hadron McGucket wrapped around him like a vine, his head tucked under Stan’s chin and his skinny arms tight around Stan’s middle, his long beard tickling where it pressed against Stan’s chest. He had one hell of a grip for such a beanpole, Stan thought muzzily, before reality kicked in. The trouble was, it was damn near impossible to detangle himself from Vine McGucket, and just as he thought he might just’ve managed it without waking Fidds by accident, Fiddleford’s eyes blinked open and he smiled up at Stan, looking happier to see him than Stan was at all prepared to deal with at half six in the morning.

“Five more minutes,” he said sleepily, tugging at Stan’s shoulder.

Stan shook him off. “Can’t,” he said gruffly, “Got to get things done. Your list’s on the dresser, make sure you take a look at it.”

The lists had been another of Mabel’s bright ideas, so as Fidds could remember what he was supposed to be doing and not forget important steps like showering, sleeping, eating, that sort of thing. So far, it seemed to have worked. Fiddleford had one notebook he used as a sort of diary, and another with just the things he needed to remember day to day, and enough post-it notes left up all over the Shack that they could’ve wallpapered the place with the damn things, but he hadn’t forgotten his own name since, so that had to be an improvement. The wandering off, unfortunately, hadn’t changed a bit, but the new, thicker sweater with ‘If Found, Please Return to the Mystery Shack’ in rainbow letters across the front at least meant that he usually made it back before nightfall one way or another, even if it was in the back of a squad car.

“I don’t know,” Fidds said nervously, “Something about all this just puts my teeth on edge.”

“Well, quit it, you haven’t got that many teeth to waste,” Stan said bluntly, pulling on his shirt. “And try not to scare away too many customers while you’re at it.”

Fidds smiled sleepily up at him. It was a really quite offensively endearing expression from the guy who built giant robots whenever he felt in some way slighted, and Stan absolutely did not soften a bit at the sight.

“Aw, you don’t need to worry ‘bout a thing,” he said, “I don’t think I scared ‘em that bad last time.” “…oh, boy. Just…just stay out of the gift shop, ok?”

Fidds made a noncommittal sort of noise, as if to indicate that the gift shop wasn’t that interesting anyway. He was, of course, very obviously wrong, but that was only to be expected. Guy had been living in the dump for the last twenty-odd years, it only stood to reason he was a bit out of touch with normal society and thus could not properly appreciate the wonders of Stan’s sales strategy. Stan ignored him, and was very nearly ready to face the day when Fidds spoke up again.

“When’d you get that there tattoo?”

Stan froze. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. Of course that couldn’t be expected to work on Fiddleford ‘I wouldn’t know tact if it danced naked in front of him singing a song about hedgehogs’ McGucket.

“That one there,” Fidds said helpfully, pointing at Stan’s shoulder, which twinged a little, as if in recognition. “I saw it clear as anything while you was trying to get to sleep last night.”

Oh, fuck. Stan opened his mouth to lie, and instead said. “It was twenty-five years ago…probably the biggest mistake of my life, and I had a mullet back then, so that’s saying something.”

Fiddleford gave an exaggerated, theatrical sort of shudder, “My word, you’ve certainly grown up a lot since then,” he said brightly, scrambling out of bed and across the room to tap Stan on the shoulder. Sheesh, if Stan had known the guy was going to be this touchy he wouldn’t have agreed to the whole bed-sharing thing in the first place, even to save money. Fidds grinned up at him, his fingers already at work on Stan’s bowtie. “Well, there you go,” Fidds said brightly, beaming, gave him a brief, tight hug and was already out of the room before Stan could ask what the _hell_ that was about. Stan stood there, shell-shocked, for a moment, before haring after him to demand some sort of answer. The doors were closed, of course, but Fidds himself provided the hint he needed just seconds later when there came an ear-splitting shriek from the bathroom.

“HE’S STILL THERE! HE’S FOLLOWING ME!”

Stan groaned. “Fidds?” he called, pushing the bathroom door open to see Fidds staring wild-eyed and pointing at the cracked and discoloured mirror over the sink. “Ugh, seriously? What is it now, your raccoon’s come looking for you?”

“No! It’s – there, see!” Fiddleford said, nodding. Stan looked. Well, unless McGucket was frightened of his own reflection, there wasn’t anything there. “It’s that hillbilly what lives in my mirror! He must’ve followed me here!”

Oh, great. Stan tried to remember what you were supposed to do when dealing with someone with delusions – he ought to know, he’d had it done to him often enough. “Uh…Fidds? That’s your reflection.”

“What- Naw, I’d remember if I looked like tha...” Fidds trailed off. “I- That ain’t actually me, is it?” he asked shakily.

“’Fraid so, Fidds.”

Fiddleford swallowed, “But I- How come- Where’d all m’ _hair_ go?” he almost wailed. “I don’t- I’m not s’posed to…”

“Easy, easy,” Stan said, catching hold of McGucket’s wrists before he could pull any more hair out. “I, uh, don’t really know what to say,” he admitted. “It’s…uh…it’s been a pretty long time since you last saw your reflection, hasn’t it?” Or rather, he amended, that Fidds had been able to recognise it for what it was. “I know, ok, it gets a bit spooky sometimes. Hell, I still look in the mirror sometimes expecting to see me as I was when I was seventeen or thereabouts. You get used to it after a while.”

“I just…I don’t know what happened…” Fidds mumbled, “I mean…I don’t know a lot ‘bout my life, but it seems to me there hasn’t been enough of it for all that…” he waved a hand in the direction of the mirror. “I mean, I sort of figured I was getting on a bit when Tate said he was getting too big for catch…”

“Yeah, he’s…uh…I dunno, late twenties, early thirties maybe?” Stan said awkwardly, “Good that you still made the effort, though,” he added, still not quite sure why he was trying to cheer McGucket up but feeling compelled to do it anyway. “I know my old man wouldn’t’ve.”

Fidds managed a slight, watery smile. “S’pose you think I’m being a big crybaby, fussing over a thing like that, it’s just…I ain’t made the best go of my life. I don’t remember much, but I remember that. Seems a shame I don’t have that much time left to make a go of fixing things.”

“Hey, don’t get sappy on me, pal,” Stan said warningly, “Look, I’m not much good at this whole ‘other people have feelings’ thing, but you’re not doing that bad in my book – I know Mabel thinks you’re pretty amazing. Hell, so does Soos.” Granted, Stan wasn’t sure that was much of an endorsement – those two liked _him_ , after all – but…well, McGucket couldn’t have done a worse job of screwing up his own life than Stan had. He sighed. “If it makes you feel better, I think some of your hair might grow back if you’d just stop pulling at it, and since I’m going to have to spend a small fortune fixing your teeth up and taking you to one of them quack eye doctors anyway…” that was about as far as he got, however, before Fidds launched himself at him for another hug. Stan let him, if only because…well, after twenty-five years in the dump he’d be desperate for a bit of human contact too. Not, he reminded himself sharply, that he had anything resembling a soft spot for the old hillbilly, but Mabel would complain if he wasn’t nice enough to the guy. For the sake of argument, he ignored the fact that Mabel was still in bed and would remain so until the last possible moment before school, despite getting up at the crack of dawn every weekend when the only thing Stan wanted to do was _sleep_.

True to his word, Fidds had a dentist’s appointment and a new set of glasses by the end of the following month, though Stan made sure to grumble especially loudly at the sight of the bill – hopefully no-one had noticed he’d used counterfeit bills, no-one ever noticed anything in this town, and that included the cops. Fidds saw, though, and gave Stan a disapproving look on their way back to the Shack, which evolved into an ethical argument that ended in neither of them talking to each other for three days. But other than that, it was kind of amazing how normal it felt to go downstairs on one of the rare mornings he didn’t wake up with Limpet Fidds pressed up against the nearest source of heat, otherwise known as Stan, and see Fiddleford H. McGucket sitting at the kitchen table, peering at the schematics for some new machine through his glasses and muttering to himself, or strumming his banjo and singing tunelessly. Or, admittedly, having a minor breakdown on the couch because he couldn’t remember when he was born, _why couldn’t he remember when he was born?_ That was happening less and less often these days, though, and…hell, it wasn’t as if Stan couldn’t work around it if it meant free labour. It was…nice. He didn’t have that many better words for it. They designated a birthday for Fidds pretty much at random, Tate McGucket having pointedly refused to answer any of Mabel’s questions the last time they went up to the lake to fish, and celebrated it, complete with cake and balloons and ill-advised glittery question mark candles they’d used when Fidds couldn’t remember how old he actually was – not much more than sixty, Stan thought, going off Tate McGucket’s age. Mabel started insisting that Fidds accompany her into town more and more often, and the first time Fidds got to sit down in Greasy’s Diner like a paying customer, not an annoyance to be chased out with the rats, he beamed so wide and so bright it almost hurt to look at him. Which was annoying. Clearly. What else would it be? It wasn’t as though Greasy’s Diner was all that great anyway. Stan had had better, even if he’d never actually paid for it with real money. There was no reason it should make Fidds that ridiculously happy that someone outside their little family was willing to treat him like an actual person for a change, or why he should ask to go back so often that they were eating there almost more days than they stayed home.

Lazy Susan had looked a bit disappointed to see that Stan was alone when he’d stopped in to grab a bite to eat, which had Stan glowering after her in a way that, on someone else, might have been menacing but, since it was Stan, simply had the effect of making Lazy Susan smile knowingly and head back off to the kitchen. Stan scowled down at the table, wondering why Mabel couldn’t pick up her own damn craft kits – there’d been far too many to choose from, and in the end he’d just picked the three cheapest and sparkliest because one thing that could be relied upon was that Mabel would instantly adore _anything_ if it had enough glitter – and trying not to think about Lazy Susan’s apparent dislike the fact that he was in alone today. It wasn’t as if Fidds was anything to her, after all. Hell, this time last autumn she’d spent most of her time chasing him out of her diner with a broom. Not that it mattered. If Lazy Susan wanted to flirt with the guy who used to eat out of her trash, Stan was sure she was allowed to, even if she never gave a damn before Fidds started living at the Mystery Shack and re-learning how to take care of himself.

“There you go, Mr Pines!” Lazy Susan said brightly, setting a plate of pancakes down in front of him. “Say, no McGucket this time, huh?”

“So? Mabel’s not here either,” Stan grunted, glaring down resentfully at his pancakes.

Susan shrugged, “Well, not saying it’s not nice to have her in too – she was so cute during that last tour I came to – but I always did think it was kind of sweet seeing you and McGucket coming in together. I’d never have thought it, but you make an _adorable_ old couple. Wink.”

“Wha- You mean you weren’t- Hang on, _couple_?”

Lazy Susan tutted softly, “Oh, wasn’t I supposed to say? I know it’s a bit of a new thing – hard to imagine, the way you looked the last time you came in here! Still, I suppose with the kid and all…still, who am I to talk? If you two can get to be an old married couple so quickly there’s a chance for all of us, right?” She fidgeted a little with her apron. “Been meaning to say, I think it was real sweet of you, taking McGucket in like that, and I’m right glad you two are happy with it.” She smiled and meandered away to the next table, leaving Stan sitting there thunderstruck.

“But-” he managed eventually, far too late to be of any use, “We’re not…we’re not…are we?”

 _He does sleep in your bed,_ a nasty little voice in his head that sounded suspiciously like Ford reminded him. That should’ve been a bit of a clue. Stan snorted. It wasn’t even as though anyone outside the Shack knew about that, and they didn’t _do_ anything. Fidds just…needed reminding, sometimes, when whatever it was that made him cry out in his nightmares seemed a bit too real for him to just go back to sleep. And Stan wasn’t going to waste money on a new bed with repairs to the Shack and the portal to worry about.

 _Do many couples your age ‘do anything’, Stanley?_ that irritating little Ford-voice asked snidely. Well…not that Stan knew. He’d been out of the game since he came to Gravity Falls, and it had been a few years before that that the divorce with Marilyn had left him too discouraged to try for anything serious. And, ok, so what if he and Fidds spent most of their time together? There wasn’t that much grown-up company to be had round the Mystery Shack, and most of the people in town didn’t think much of Stan, so it wasn’t as though he had other friends he was neglecting. And, ok, Fidds hugged a lot, but after at least twenty-five years in the town dump never being touched by anyone who didn’t mean to hurt him Stan’d be clingy too. At least he’d had the occasional one-night stand during his homeless days. It wasn’t as though Fidds wasn’t just as affectionate with Soos and Mabel, even if it was generally Stan he tried to snuggle up to on the sofa while Stan watched TV and Fidds tinkered away with some new project or other. And, yeah, Mabel was calling him ‘Grunkle’ and Soos was trying to come up with a portmanteau of their names – so far he’d gone through ‘Fiddlestan’, ‘Fordsquared’ and ‘Fidd Mystery! You know, like ‘Kid Mystery’?’…Stan had stamped down hard on the second one, much to Soos’ obvious disappointment, but he couldn’t imagine Ford looking at Fidds twice. His loss, because Fidds, for all his weirdness, might actually be the smartest person Stan knew. He was brilliant with machinery, to the point where new and gloriously futuristic attractions kept popping up all over the Shack without Stan even noticing until some tourist or other asked about it. And even if he was a bit tactless sometimes – like Stan could talk! – he noticed things. Things like the way Stan flinched whenever anyone mentioned his ‘tattoo’, or how Soos hated any reminder of his birthday, and any presents had to be given indirectly, and at least a week before or after the actual day. And he was kind, when he remembered to be, and could be funny intentionally when he wanted to, and just…why the hell had nobody helped him before? Why hadn’t Stan ever tried to help him before when he knew damn well what it was like and Fidds deserved far less than he ever had. And- Oh. Oh, _fuck_.

Stan looked at the evidence, and felt an awful sort of certainty creeping up his spine. “Oh, holy Moses,” he said to himself, with dawning horror. “I’m in a relationship with Old Man McGucket.”

He wandered out of the diner in a sort of haze, for once genuinely forgetting to pay rather than skipping out on the check. He was in an actual relationship with Fiddleford Hadron McGucket…and not only had he not noticed, but they still hadn’t gotten to any of the good stuff. He shut that line of thinking down _fast_. Fidds was just…confused. Yeah, that’d be it. It wasn’t as if Stan had anything against the idea of having a guy around like that, though his taste hadn’t always been brilliant, he’d be the first to admit. Hell, he still remembered the Jimmy Snakes fiasco, which had ended with Stan in prison for the third time and Jimmy nowhere to be found – no surprise, really, but it would’ve been nice to get an actual, in-person breakup. After that whole mess, and the long string of users, psychos and assholes Stan had gone for _before_ Jimmy, it probably said something that the best choice of the lot of them was the crazy old man who lived in the dump and ate possums. Well, no, that probably wasn’t fair. If Carla McCorkle came back into his life right now and said she’d marry him today if only he’d get rid of his creepy roommate, he’d still tell her to fuck off and keep Fidds around. It scared the hell out of him.

Because Fidds, however much better he seemed these days, was still pretty badly off. He remembered things better, yeah, because of Mabel’s scrapbooks and the diary he’d started keeping, and all the little notebooks full of day-to-day details that he carried around with him everywhere. If Stan told him they were together, he’d believe it. And…well, Stan wasn’t one for many moral lines, but if he did that he didn’t think he’d be able to look at himself in the mirror again for the rest of his life. There was only one thing for it, then. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t slept down by the portal before, before Mabel came along when he’d been able to work through the night and still drag himself up to the shop in the morning to greet the first tourists of the day. The last thing Fidds needed was for some grubby con-artist to take advantage of the fact that his memory had been shot all to hell and if he knew even half of what Stan had done he’d never consider it. Best clear up the confusion now before he got any more used to Fidds’ ridiculous over-affectionate ways than he already was. In a couple weeks Fidds might not even remember he’d been doing anything odd.

It took until the next morning for Fidds to notice, but that wasn’t very odd – Stan often spent his nights down with the portal, even now, as it seemed more and more likely that he’d never be able to make the old thing work again. What was odd was waking up, on the couch, with Fiddleford tucked into his chest like a pair of…what was that phrase people always used? Forks in a drawer or something like that? Well, not like it mattered, since Stan knew what he meant and it wasn’t as if he’d be telling anyone else about this. He was halfway through trying to disentangle himself when Fidds woke up and confirmed pretty much all Stan’s worst suspicions by kissing him.

It wasn’t even much of a kiss, was the worst of it, just a dry brush of lips that only barely caught the corner of Stan’s mouth, the tickle of Fidds’ beard rasping against Stan’s stubble. And then it was over, and Stan had to deal with it.

“What the hell was that all about?” he demanded, catching Fidds’ wrists gently and tugging them away from his shoulders.

Fidds blinked at him. “I…I think I kissed you?” he said, sounding bewildered. “I did do it right, didn’t I? I don’t really recall having done that yet…you’re s’posed to, ain’t you?”

“Uh…with some people,” Stan admitted awkwardly, “Like your wife or your husband or some shit like that…girlfriends too,” he added, “And…yeah, you can probably do it with anyone you’re really close to, but it’s sort of different…ugh, I don’t even know…”

Fidds cackled wheezily. “I think I remember the basics of it,” he said, pressing closer against Stan’s side. Stan swallowed. This was going to be harder than he’d been thinking.

“So, uh, if you do, how come you just…” he made a vague sort of gesture, not really wanting to say the words ‘kiss me’, just in case not saying them would make it not have happened. Well, you never did know in this town.

“Ain’t I supposed to?” Fidds asked, looking bewildered. “I mean…we’re married, ain’t we?”

Stan stared.

“I know it ain’t strictly legal in the rest of the state,” Fidds added,  defensive now, “I asked Mabel to check up on it for me, but the way I look on it…well, not like not having a piece of paper’s got to change anything, right?”

“Fidds,” Stan said helplessly, not quite sure where to go from there. He pulled away, for once not sure where to go. “I don’t know if you noticed,” he settled on at last, because abrasiveness was always easier than trying to be nice about it, “But we…uh…we’re not exactly there, y’know? I mean, normally you _ask_ someone before getting into a relationship.” The moment he’d said it, he wished he hadn’t. If Fidds asked, he’d have to explain why he was saying no, and Stan had never been much good at standing up to people he…fuck, fuck, fuck, when had he let himself start thinking of Fidds – of _McGucket_ as someone he was that close to?

Fidds just looked confused at that. “Uh…didn’t we already do all that?”

“Sorry…look, it’s not that I don’t think you’re a great guy and all,” Stan hedged. “Look, it came as a bit of a shock, was all.”

A few weeks ago, he’d have needed to explain even more, but apparently the notebook idea was working better than he’d expected because Fidds picked up on it pretty much instantly, and if Stan hadn’t wanted to see the look on his face before…

“We weren’t ever involved, were we?”

“Nope.” Stan crossed his arms, trying to look anywhere but at Fidds’ face. “Look, I know how it looks, but I wasn’t trying to con you into anything. If you’re pissed with me…well, you’ve got every reason,” he admitted. “I’ve done…a lot of things you don’t know about and don’t want mixed up with.”

“Don’t I?” Fidds asked, and from someone else that would’ve been an accusation. From Fidds, it was just what it said. What was Stan supposed to do with that?

“Look, the point is…we’re not like that. I mean, I am,” he amended, “But you don’t have to be stuck with me, and…well,” he wasn’t used to this. Normally he was _all about_ taking advantage of people. You kind of had to be, in his line of work. He’d never been in a position to do it this way, though, and the thought of it elicited a sharp stab of what he tentatively identified as guilt. Another lie – he knew that feeling all too well – but, even in his own head, he didn’t like to admit it. “Look, you’re not in the best of shape right now, ok? And now I find out you think we’re married, which makes things even worse, because there’s a lot better than me out there, ok? And if you thought this was all you could get, I get how you might be willing to settle, but-” he broke off. This speaking honestly thing was getting to be painful.

“Is that all?” Fidds asked, and for the first time he sounded resentful. “I don’t remember much, I’ll grant you, but – you helped me, you and Mabel. Ain’t no-one else in this town was willing to do that.”

“Don’t. Fidds…look, normally I’d be fine with taking advantage of your gratitude. Maybe get a new roof or a giant robot out of it, something to show off for the tourists, y’know? But…look, I’m no good at the whole relationships thing. I’ve been divorced once already, and had any number of bad breakups besides. What I’m getting at here is…you’re still not altogether compos mentis, y’know? Give it a couple months, maybe a year or two…you’ll feel differently. We’ve got a good thing going now, no need to make it complicated.”

“Like hell there ain’t,” said Fidds, setting his jaw. It was much easier to see that without most of the beard, Stan noticed, rather dazedly. “Look- I didn’t want to say this before, but- What I’m saying is…I think you’re the best thing I can ever remember happening to me, Stanford Pines, and that ain’t just because of the help. It’s cos you _chose_ to help me, even though I weren’t nothing to you, no matter how much you like to pin it all on Mabel. It’s the way you look when you’re scamming someone, how you _enjoy_ it so darn much. Your whole face just lights up when you’re on a con, and it’s a wonder to me how the rest of the world don’t see it.” He smiled crookedly. “It’s even the way you always sing about what you’re doing, and I’ve got to be besotted if I can say that.”

Stan didn’t often find himself lost for words. Well, no, he routinely found himself lost for words, particularly where…ugh… _feelings_ were concerned, which made living with Mabel a veritable minefield, just…not usually around Fidds. That was half the issue, they were too damn comfortable with each other – no wonder the guy was getting confused. He pulled away sharply.

“Look, I get it, ok? I just- Look- Can we just pretend this never happened?”

It was the wrong thing to say. Fidds’ face fell, and he hopped off the sofa, looking as if Stan had just kicked his puppy, or one of the various miniature pet-bots he and Mabel kept making, and Stan didn’t have a fucking clue how to make this better, because it wasn’t as if he hadn’t been telling the truth for once, and it wasn’t as if Fidds was in any state for it, and it wasn’t as if he didn’t deserve so much better than Stan anyway. And if Stan gave in now, maybe it’d be good in the short term, but…he’d never been good at breakups, and Mabel and Soos would be upset if Fidds left, and Stan couldn’t imagine a single way that this could possibly end well. But there wasn’t really anything Stan could say without getting Fidds’ hopes up again, so he just let him go.

On balance, that might’ve been a mistake. What was definitely a mistake was, after all that mess, not immediately stepping on it when Fidds started being extra-nice to him about a week later. To be fair, though, he wasn’t expecting Fidds to bounce back this quickly. At first, he’d even been relieved Fidds seemed to be back to his usual level of good-natured chaos. Then he started offering to give Old Goldie a good going-over, and Stan’s instincts, dulled as they were from far too many years with a stable roof over his head and no need to worry about his next meal was coming from, started to perk up a bit. Fidds had never made any secret of it that the old machine just plain ticked him off. Too much of a reminder of the taunts that’d been thrown at him in the twenty-odd years before he came to live at the Mystery Shack, or maybe he was just one of those people who got creeped out by sideshow attractions, though if that was so he’d had a bit of bad luck being rescued by Mabel that winter. Either way, the last thing he’d have wanted to do on his own account was make sure Stan could keep Goldie around even longer than he already had. Stan knew an attempt to butter him up when he saw one, but…damn it, when had it gotten to the stage where he didn’t like seeing Fidds hurt? Ok, it might’ve been there from the beginning, if only because Fidds’ episodes happened more often when he was upset and god knew those had been a pain in the ass to sit through, but even so. But what was he supposed to say? Stop trying to be nice to me? It went against the grain of Stan’s basically selfish nature to even consider it.

The next day, Fidds made coffee, just the way Stan liked it despite the fact Stan _knew_ Fidds preferred it with so much cream and sugar he nearly had a heart attack just looking at the cup. Stan tried to see this as a positive sign, at least compared to repairing Old Goldie so thoroughly the old machine looked almost new again. Then Fidds drafted Soos and Mabel to help him work on that giant robot Stan had mentioned wanting as an outdoor attraction, and Stan knew things really had gotten out of hand. On the other hand…well, it wasn’t like Fidds had _said_ anything. Stan was good at this. So long as no-one actually _said_ it, he could pretend it wasn’t happening and…well, not like he didn’t want the guy around – that was half the reason he’d said no in the first place. All he had to do was pretend it wasn’t happening, and it wouldn’t.

And if, sometimes, when he was working on the portal, or in the Shack, or when he was just on the edge of sleep, he couldn’t help the way his mind drifted to what might have happened if he’d said yes, kissed back, let Fidds believe it…Well. Stan had never been good at doing the right thing. He wasn’t going to screw it up on those rare occasions he actually pulled it off.


	8. In Which Soos Gains A Sister

There are three things Soos found out almost immediately after starting at the Mystery Shack. The first thing is, Stan Pines is kind of an asshole. Like, seriously, Soos saw him run down and tackle a five-year-old over a dollar once – a _Canadian_ dollar, and he’s pretty sure Mr Pines is the one who keeps stealing his toffee peanuts too. So, yeah, if you’re the sort of person who takes that kind of thing personally, Mr Pines isn’t exactly an ideal employer, but whatever, it’s not as though Soos was expecting perfect anyway, and even if Mr Pines can be a bit of an ass sometimes, he’s never that bad to Soos. The second thing is, tourists will swallow pretty much anything if Mr Pines is the one who’s selling it. Soos tries every now and then when he’s fixing the shelves in the gift shop or just hanging around waiting for Mr Pines to notice him and give him something else to do, but somehow he’s never quite got the knack for it. Not enough confidence, Mr Pines says. Just act like the whole world’s at your feet, and you’ll have them _begging_ to buy your merchandise – Mr Pines’ merchandise, that is, he usually adds around that point, with the sort of glare that’s more like a smile in fancy dress. The third thing Soos finds out, though, is the most surprising, and that is that Mr Pines would do pretty much anything for his niece Mabel.

Ok, it’s not that big a surprise when you get to think about it. Soos wasn’t really allowed to go to the Mystery Shack that much before he started working there – Abuelita still remembers the days when it had been the Murder Hut, and even if Soos doesn’t think Mr Pines is actually a retired serial killer, he can see him playing that angle if it brought in a few more tourists. But that’s beside the point. The point is, Soos hasn’t been working here all that long, but even he can see that Stan Pines is the world’s biggest sucker when it comes to that little girl. If she wants to play at being a mermaid, she gets to sit in a glass tank and wave at the tourists as they ooh and ah and pay to take pictures. She wants to be a werewolf for a day? Even less of a problem, just a cage and a furry onesie and the Mystery Shack’s got a whole new attraction. If she weren’t such a cute kid when she wasn’t having a tantrum, Soos would have a hard time not hating her for it, but she is, so he doesn’t.

It wasn’t exactly a secret that Mr Pines had a kid – Soos had seen them around every now and again, in Greasy’s diner or the Summerween Superstore or places like that – but it just hadn’t really hit him before he came in early on his second day at work, to find Mr Pines with an armful of wriggling toddler.

“Oh, there you are,” Mr Pines grunted as soon as he caught sight of Soos. “Shelves in the back need fixing.”

“You got it, Mr Pines,” Soos said, heading towards the shelves before he registered what he’d just seen. “Wait…is that that mermaid girl?”

“You bet it is,” Mr Pines grumbled, “Mabel, sweetie, hold still for your Grunkle Stan,”

Mabel giggled. “Won’t,” she said happily. “Won’t, won’t, won’t. Want juice.”

“If I give you juice, will you hold still?” Mr Pines asked, and sighed, “Soos, get one of the juice boxes from under the counter and toss it here, before we lose our mermaid.” Mabel giggled again, and clapped her hands happily, and Mr Pines winced. “Well, at least she isn’t making too much trouble this time,” he said irritably.

“Does she do that a lot?” Soos asked.

“More and more lately – give that here.” He caught the juice box with his free hand and presented it to Mabel with a flourish. “Now, what do we say to tourists?” he asked.

Mabel beamed. “Buy! Buy!” she shrieked. “Grunkle Stan, who this?”

“That’s my girl,” Mr Pines said, grinning from ear to ear, “This is Soos, new handyman.”

Mabel gave him an eerily thoughtful look for a girl of not-quite-two. “Better’n Edwin,” she said decidedly, and Soos couldn’t help a little sigh of relief. He couldn’t have screwed up too badly yesterday, then.

“Uh, hey, girl dude,” he said, sticking out a hand to very gently high-five the little girl. She really was tiny, with her little brown pigtails and miniature version of Mr Pines’ nose. The iridescent tail was a bit of a shock, at least until he noticed the stitches where it’d been taken out over the years to fit a growing Mabel.

“’ey.” Mabel grinned at him, showing off a full set of very small, slightly crooked, teeth. Soos grinned back, and when he looked up at Mr Pines his new employer looked quite pleased, as if Soos had just passed some kind of test he hadn’t been expected to.

“Ok, ok, you’ve done the whole bonding thing, now get back to work,” Mr Pines grumbled, hefting Mabel up with a groan, “This kid’s got an appointment with a couple hundred tourists – what do we do, kiddo,” he added, lifting Mabel up to look her in the face with an expression of the utmost seriousness.

“Bleed ‘em dry,” Mabel parroted back, clapping her pudgy hands together. It was worryingly cute, all things considered.

Soos didn’t get the rest of the story about what Mabel was doing at the Mystery Shack for years after that, so he ended up making up his own. He found himself doing that a lot, what with the number of weird things Mr Pines had done or said he’d done before he started the Mystery Shack. And, since it was all AU anyway, he didn’t think it was that bad to introduce an extra character to the little family, in the form of Stan Jr, Mabel’s big brother. It was the sort of thing the guys in the Tiger Fist fandom online would’ve called a shameless self-insert, but it wasn’t a self-insert if you were already a part of the story, but just had to change a few things about where you fitted in. A lot of the things Stan Jr did were just the things Soos did anyway, like watching Mabel when she got too big to be kept in a tank while the tourists were going round, as he was cheaper than getting the Corduroys to keep an eye on her, or coming up with new ideas for the Shack, even if Questiony the Question Mark didn’t go down nearly so well in real life as it had done in the fic. Soos was still a bit disappointed about that one, to tell the truth.

Soos didn’t get the rest of the story until the day the other kid, Dipper, turned up at the Shack, and Mr Pines and Mabel had the biggest fight Soos had ever seen in the whole ten years he’d been working there, and that included the ‘you let our niece build a giant punchy robot’ row of ’08, which had preceded a whole week of no-one at the Shack talking to anyone else, with the sole exception of Soos, who had spent that whole week running back and forth carrying messages for pretty much everyone else. When the fight was over, Mabel had stormed off outside, Mr McGucket was upstairs trying to console Mabel’s apparent long-lost twin Dipper, and Mr Pines had disappeared entirely, even though Soos had last seen him disappearing into the gift shop in the direction of the vending machine. There wasn’t much Soos could do around the place now, so he headed outside, to find Mabel sitting out on the porch with her back to him, her shoulders shaking.

“So…uh…your brother seems cool,” he said awkwardly. He had done, too. Confused, and maybe a bit freaked out by the whole thing, but still cool. “Uh…Mabel? You listening, hambone?”

“Mabel’s not here,” said a slightly muffled voice, “She’s in sweater town.”

Soos considered that for a few seconds, then sat down next to her. “You want to come out of there?”

Mabel didn’t reply, which probably meant ‘no’. Soos nodded, and settled in to watch the last few gnomes go sneaking off into the undergrowth.

“They didn’t want me,” Mabel said at last, and though part of the muffling was undoubtedly the sweater she’d pulled on since her fight with Mr Pines, Soos knew what she sounded like when she was tearful. “They- I thought they were _dead_ , but all this time they just didn’t _want_ me!”

Soos didn’t say anything. Under other circumstances, he’d be pretty sure that this was the point where he ought to say something like ‘yeah, me neither’ and do the whole ‘heart to heart over missing parents’ thing. But he couldn’t. He put his arm around Mabel instead.

“Mr Pines wants you, though,” he said. “And Mr McGucket, and your brother came all this way just to see you – you don’t do that if you don’t want to, at least, I don’t think you do.” Mabel sniffed. “But- But they never even visit,” she said plaintively, “Did- Didn’t they even want to know I was getting on ok?”

“I don’t know, Mabel,” Soos said awkwardly, “Maybe they just didn’t want you to feel…uh…kind of like you do now.”

“That didn’t turn out so good,” Mabel said moodily, kicking a stone, which bounced off one of the closer trees and hit a passing gnome, almost knocking its hat off. “I don’t know either, I just…why wouldn’t they want me? I hug a lot, I can burp the alphabet, I have scratch and sniff clothing…”

“Beats me, girl dude,” Soos said, shrugging, “Abuelita ‘n me would adopt you in a second if Mr Pines and Mr McGucket wouldn’t take offence.”

Mabel gave a damp-sounding little chuckle, and Soos grinned. It wasn’t exactly a lie – Soos had been mentally counting himself as practically part of the Pines family for years now, which meant that Mabel logically also had half-shares in Abuelita – it seemed only fair, if Soos was claiming the same from her uncles.

Still…Soos knew a bit about people not wanting you. And when you got that into your head, it didn’t matter how many other people did, just that the specific person you wanted so much to care about you didn’t. You could let that thought eat you up whole, if you weren’t careful, Soos knew that much. He’d come far too close to it, that one year when Mr Pines tried to have his birthday removed from the calendar and ended up on the no-fly list because of it. Soos still wasn’t exactly sure how that one happened, but it had been a nice gesture while it lasted.

“’Sides,” he said, nudging Mabel in the side, “You didn’t used to want them before Dipper turned up.”

“I don’t!” Mabel said heatedly. “I don’t want them, if they’re going to just up and give me away, that’s _fine_. I don’t need them! I don’t need any of them!”

“If you say so,” Soos said, shrugging, “Dipper didn’t do anything to you, though. He seems like he might be a bit of a cool guy, if you just gave him a chance.”

Mabel scrubbed at her eyes with the heel of her hand, sitting up so that the sweater wasn’t covering her entirely anymore. “I always wanted a _little_ brother,” she agreed, elbowing Soos companionably in the side. “D’you think he’d want to go adventuring with Candy and Grenda and Wendy and me?”

“Sure,” Soos said, “Like I said, he seemed pretty cool about the whole gnome thing.”

Mabel grinned, and Soos grinned back. “I guess so,” Mabel agreed. “Guess I can’t put this off forever, can I?”

“Nope,” Soos replied. “I mean, he’s getting the other bed in you room, isn’t he? You’ll have to see him before you go to sleep.”

Mabel wrinkled her nose. “Yeah…that’s going to be weird. I mean, I’ve had sleepovers, but I’m not really in the mood for a pillow fight right now.”

“Tired of pillow fights?” Soos exclaimed, staring at her in frozen horror. “That’s like being tired of life.”

Mabel snickered, but when Soos got up and offered her his hand, she took it, and the two of them headed back inside to face the music.


	9. In Which There Are Reactions

Mabel stared at him. Dipper stared back, not quite sure what else there was to do.

“No, you’re not,” Mabel said, “You can’t be.”

Dipper frowned. “Uh…why can’t I?” he asked. Looking at her up-close, it was insane to think she hadn’t figured it out – they looked creepily alike, the way twins in books did but actual, real-life twins apparently didn’t. Seriously, if Dipper had just run into her on the street he could’ve worked it out, it was that much like looking into some sort of Mirror of Drag.

“I haven’t got a twin,” Mabel said matter-of-factly, “And you can’t be the twin I don’t have, because if I had one, I’d know about it.” She gave a little nod, apparently satisfied with this explanation.

“I thought that too,” Dipper said eagerly, “Then I found these old documents at the hospital when we were doing this class project thing…see? Mabel Pines, right there!”

Mabel stared at the papers, and then at Dipper himself. “These…these can’t be real, right?” she said, and her voice was shaking. “Or…what, couldn’t Grunkle Stan take us both and you got fostered somewhere else?”

“Fostered?” Dipper asked, “No- Uh, no. I’m with our parents back in Piedmont.”

Mabel snorted, “Yeah, right. Probably got sent off to some other branch of the family because our parents couldn’t raise us or were dead or something.”

“No – Look, here, those are my parents’ names on the birth certificate, they’re our actual parents, they have to be!” Dipper pointed again at the document, and saw Mabel’s eyes widen.

“But- But they _can’t_ be,” she said, stumbling over her words a little, “I- I thought my parents were dead.”

Dipper rubbed at the back of his head, unsettling his hat slightly. “Yeah…guess that’d be the obvious assumption,” he admitted. Why hadn’t anyone told her? He’d been able to find out about her pretty easily, once he’d started looking…then again, he hadn’t been exactly _told_ about it either. “They aren’t, though,” he added. It was, naturally, the wrong thing to say.

“They’ve been _alive_ this whole time?” Mabel yelled, “They’re still alive, and they’ve been alive all this time, and they never- they never-” she seemed to be hyperventilating, her eyes huge in her pale face, and Dipper was almost worried she’d burst into tears or have a fit or something if he pushed her any harder.

“Mabel! There’s stock here needs unpacking!” came a yell from inside the Mystery Shack.

Mabel looked around, her jaw set. “Grunkle Stan! Could you come out here?”

A man in a dark suit appeared in the doorway. “What’s this about? That stock’s not about to unpack itself, you know…hey, who the hell is this kid?”

Mabel folded her arms. “Grunkle Stan, you would’ve told me if I had a twin, wouldn’t you?” she looked back at Dipper and glared at him, as if daring him to repeat what he’d been saying.

The man crossed his arms too, his gaze drifting away to one side, “Uh…why’d you want to know, sweetie?”

Mabel jerked her chin at Dipper, not meeting his eyes, “Well, this guy _says_ he’s my brother,”

The man swallowed. “He’s right,” he admitted, glancing over at Dipper. “What’s your name, kid?”

Dipper started. “What-? Uh, Dipper. Dipper Pines.”

The man – their Great-Uncle Stan, Dipper guessed – nodded, “Right, Dipper,” he said quickly, “Dipper’s telling the truth, Mabel. You’re twins.”

“WHAT?” Mabel very nearly shrieked. “You- You _lied_ to me?”

Stan put up his hands, “Hey, not exactly lying,” he hedged, “You never _asked_ if you had a secret twin brother somewhere…”

“Yes, I did!” Mabel said, looking furious. “You just acted like it was some kind of joke!”

Stan swallowed. “Look, Mabel, _Mabel_ …”

“Let me guess? When I get to your age I’ll _understand_ how you _had to bend the truth a bit_ , for _the greater good_?”

Dipper didn’t think he’d ever seen so many uses of air-quotes in one sentence before, but Mabel did it anyway.

Stan sighed. “I guess you were always going to find out eventually,” he said, sounding exhausted. “I just…damn, kid, how was I supposed to tell you? Not like there’s a self-help guide or anything…”

“Oh, I don’t know, how about ‘Mabel, you live with me because your parents TOSSED YOU AWAY LIKE YESTERDAY’S TRASH’!” Mabel yelled, her eyes full of tears, and Dipper looked from her to Stan, his stomach twisting uncomfortably.

“It wasn’t like that,” Stan said desperately, “Look, I know how it sounds, ok, but there was-”

“I DON’T CARE!” Mabel yelled, and she was starting to cry now, angry tears running down her face, “You should’ve told me!”

“Look, kid-” Stan started, but Mabel wasn’t having it.

“Oh, is someone talking right now, because I can’t hear them!” she clapped her hands over her ears and turned away, singing off-key at the top of her lungs.

“Uh…Mabel, honey? Those little varmints back again, because I’m pretty sure I’ve got the gnome-repellent spray right this time…” Another man stuck his head out around the doorframe, and Dipper just stared. He was quite sure no-one had mentioned anyone else living at the Mystery Shack. Not that he’d asked around much, but he probably ought to have been told. His eyes, wide and bright blue behind thick round glasses, caught on Dipper. “Oh! Uh, hey, stranger – you’re not another of them gnome-doohickies, are you?”

“Um…” Dipper started. That was apparently wrong too, because the old man flipped down a sort of visor in front of his eyes.

“Because if you _are_ …” he went on, producing a canister of something poisonously green and bubbling apparently out of nowhere, “We’re going to have to have a little conversation-”

Dipper backpedalled so fast he thought he might have left skid marks in the dirt, “What- No! No, I’m not- I’m Dipper, Dipper Pines, Mabel and I are twins-”

All at once, the man’s face went white. “T-twins, did you say?” he asked, looking as if he’d just been given an electric shock. “Right- I- I don’t…I don’t think I ever forgot something that big before…”

“No, Fidds,” Stan said, “You didn’t forget anything, Dipper’s just arrived from Piedmont. Could you-” he cast a look over at Mabel, who was still resolutely ignoring him, her hands plastered over her ears, “Could you just take him inside and…uh…get him out of the way while I explain things to Mabel. I, uh,” he glanced back at Mabel. “I may not’ve told her about him before.”

‘Fidds’ nodded, “Right y’are,” he said agreeably, “C’mon inside, will you? We’ll get you all unpacked and sorted – how long’re you staying for?”

“As long as I can,” Dipper promised, “I mean, my parents aren’t expecting me back ‘till the end of the summer, but if Mabel doesn’t want me around-”

‘Fidds’ waved an airy hand, “Aw, don’t be like that. She’s madder at Stan than she is at you, I’ll bet. Not like it’s your fault, is it?”

Dipper shifted uneasily. “I- I guess. So, uh, what do you do round here?”

“This ‘n that,” ‘Fidds’ said easily, “Wait a second – seems to me we ain’t been properly introduced yet. Fiddleford McGucket, Mabel calls me Grunkle Fidds.”

“Dipper Pines,” Dipper said, “Hang on, you’re our uncle too?”

Grunkle Fidds shrugged. “Sure – well, only Stan if we’re talking the conventional way, but I’ve known her since she was yea high, so she might as well be family.”

Oh. _Oh_. No need to worry about getting a bad reaction from his newfound sister if anything came out, then. That was a relief.

 “So…did you know?” he asked, “I mean, Stan seems to, but-”

Grunkle Fidds shrugged, “Can’t say as I recall. Might’ve told me at some point, but I never did have much luck where remembering things was concerned.”

“Oh, right.” Dipper looked down at his feet, and tried to come up with something else to ask as they headed upstairs. “How long’ve you been working on that gnome repellent stuff?”

“Just since the old gnome queen started getting sick,” Grunkle Fidds said cheerfully, “They started looking for a new one right away, didn’t want to waste time and all, and they went after a few of Mabel’s friends. Seemed sensible to make sure they wouldn’t be able to nab anyone if they tried it.”

“Yeah,” Dipper said, “Little creeps – do they do that a lot, then? Kidnap human girls and…”

Grunkle Fidds made a so-so sort of gesture, “I don’t rightly know, just that they’ve been trying it on a lot lately. Roof-mounted death ray helps, though.”

“Wait, what?” Dipper stared at him, “Did you say _death ray_?” The gnomes had been one thing, but this – what sort of crazy town was this, and how come Mabel got to live out here and he hadn’t? If Mom and Dad hadn’t wanted them both, they should’ve either sent them both away or got used to having two kids.

“I certainly did!” Grunkle Fidds grinned toothlessly at him, and Dipper couldn’t help but grin back. Roof-mounted death rays, gnome attacks, and a chance to finally get to know his sister – this summer was looking up.  “You’ll be in here,” Grunkle Fidds added, “Ain’t much room anywhere else, and I reckon you’d rather be close to your sister.”

It was an attic, and had the look of having at one point probably been used for storage. That, though, was hardly noticeable in the face of enough posters and pictures to paper the walls, everything from caricatures of people made over as various sorts of monsters – Dipper was quite sure he spotted a harpy version of Grunkle Fidds pinned up over the round window – to popular boybands to what looked like playbills for old circus attractions. There was an extra bed, though it wasn’t made, and a picture of a two-masted ship in full sail hanging over it.

“Here y’are,” Grunkle Fidds said brightly, “Uh, spare sheets and stuff’re under the bed, Mabel’s friends use ‘em for sleepovers.”

“Thanks…” Dipper swallowed, trying not to listen to the raised voices coming from downstairs. “So…uh...is this what it’s going to be like all summer?” he asked, unable to quite stop himself.

Fidds stopped, and put a hand on Dipper’s shoulder, “I shouldn’t reckon so. It’s Stan she’s mad at, not you. Come to think of it, I’m not all that pleased with him either, but…” he shrugged, “I guess he really couldn’t think what to say ‘bout it, or just didn’t want to upset her or something. He ain’t got the best track record where emotional decisions are concerned – and I once built a homicidal pterodactyl-tron to cope with my ex-wife leaving, so if _I_ think you’re making bad decisions, it’d better be a doozy.”

“Yeah…” Dipper hedged, drawing the word out as far as he could. Well, he’d known from the words ‘death ray’ what he was dealing with; it wasn’t much good backing out now.


	10. In Which There Is A Reunion

The bus crashed through the bubble of Mabel’s fantasy world like…well, bursting a soap bubble. Looking back, Dipper saw Ford’s image flicker and then vanish as the streets and houses of Mabel’s version of Gravity Falls warped and faded into nothingness behind them. Where was he now? Trapped in gold, tortured by Bill, or even nowhere at all – there was no way to know for sure. And then, all at once, they began to fall, Dipper’s stomach swooping as they plummeted towards the far side of the gorge, so fast he hardly had time to realise just how utterly screwed they were until-

BOOM.

The bus hit, with a sound like an earthquake, and if gravity had not as completely out to lunch as all the other laws of reality, there was no way they would have survived it. Even as it was, the bus was a write-off, and as Dipper dragged himself free of the burning wreckage, he could see things had only gotten worse in the however long it had been they had been trapped in Mabel’s bubble. Bill’s pyramid stood out all the darker now against the sun, and- was that a fifty-foot high Gompers rampaging over there? Dipper squinted. It was. Huh.

It wasn’t a long trek back to the Mystery Shack. One of the great benefits of the sheer screwiness of what Bill had done to Gravity Falls, that – a journey that had taken the best part of a week on the way took minutes going back, though that could just have been the lack of Gideon trying to get in their way.

The Shack looked about as unchanged as it was possible for anything to be in this mad world, and Dipper couldn’t help his relief at the sight of the place, leaky roof and all. Hell, even Grunkle Fidds’ Iron Giant was still there, apparently entirely free of Bill’s tampering.

“Yes! It’s in shambles! Just like we left it!”

Wendy grinned, “Oh, man, this is the first time I’ve ever felt _happy_ going to work.”

Dipper couldn’t blame her – the Shack was…well, in this hellscape, about as close to ‘home’ as any of them had left.

Mabel broke into a run, and the rest of them sped up to match her as they raced across the clearing.

“Hello, house! Hello, porch! Hello, wads of gum I left stuck to the couch?” She leant heavily against said couch, looking more content even than she had done in the fantasy Gravity Falls of the bubble, with its friendly monsters and familiar landmarks. Even in her fantasies, it seemed, Mabel _belonged_ at the Mystery Shack.

Dipper reached for the door, but then, he heard it – the sounds of indistinct voices, heavy footfalls, and what sounded suspiciously like a low roar.

“Wait- What was that?” He looked around at the others, and picked up a golf club that had been lying abandoned on the porch. Wendy lifted her crossbow, Mabel her grappling hook.

“Let’s get ‘em, dudes,” Soos said determinedly.

They threw the door open with a roar of defiance, heard another, answering roar, and then-

“Stan?” “Kids?”

Of course, then the Multi-Bear stuck his head out of the bathroom and completely ruined the mood, but it was nice while it lasted. It looked like half the town was gathered in the Shack – Candy and Grenda, that creepy guy who married a woodpecker, most of the gnomes, even that unicorn Mabel beat up a few weeks back. And, there, at Stan’s right hand, holding a futuristic laser gun and with his beard down to his knees, but there and alive and back at the Shack at last, was Grunkle Fidds. Next to him, Mabel made a noise like an excited baby seal, and threw herself at her- to hell with it, at her _parents_. It looked to Dipper more like she was strangling them than anything, with one arm slung around Grunkle Stan’s neck and the other around Grunkle Fidds, but they didn’t seem to mind.

“You’re back!” he said, when Mabel didn’t. “What happened? I thought you and Grunkle Stan were finished.”

Grunkle Fidds scratched behind his ear, looking faintly sheepish. “Yeah, well…might’ve been a bit hasty ‘bout that. And we’ve, uh, had a bit of time to talk ‘bout why _impersonating your brother for thirty years_ and then _not telling your boyfriend_ might be a bit of a bad idea.”

Stan raised his hands defensively, “Hey, you never asked!”

“If we still had a couch, you’d be sleeping on it,” Fidds told him without blinking, and Grunkle Stan grumbled, but didn’t actually object.

He caught sight of Dipper across the room, and raised a free arm, “Ok, get over here, you knuckleheads.”

That was all the invitation any of them needed. Soos barrelled into Stan, and didn’t let go. Apparently he’d been hugging strangers for practice. Weird, but if the person going around saving other people from the apocalypse wanted a hug in return, Dipper didn’t think there were that many people out there who’d refuse him.

“So…what’s everyone doing here?” Dipper said, as soon as he’d got his breath back, because Grunkle Stan hugged _hard_.

Mabel nodded, and glanced around. “Yeah…there’s monsters, and _gnomes_ , and…is Pacifica wearing a potato sack?”

“Hey!” Pacifica cut in irritably, “Even in a sack I still look better than you.”

“Sure you do,” Mabel said brightly, and Dipper remembered the gorgon Pacifica of Mabel’s fantasy Gravity Falls, the one he had thought exaggerated to be even prettier than the original. It was only now, watching them, that he thought that maybe that was just how Mabel saw Pacifica all the time. Waddles, who had apparently been in the Shack this whole time, butted his head up against Mabel’s side with an insistent oink, and for a moment, apocalypse or no apocalypse, Mabel looked about as happy as Dipper had seen her in all his time in Gravity Falls.

Then, the call came from the doorway. “Hey, everyone! Eye-bat!”

The whole Shack was plunged into chaos, the lamps were snuffed out, and Grunkle Stan had to practically drag Mabel and Soos to the ground as, outside, the eerie red light cast by the eye-bats flickered over the Shack.


End file.
